The purpose of this project is to create a comparative study aiming at understanding how racial and cultural identities are articulated in the independent cinemas of Canada, South Africa, and Australia. Given our global contemporary context of new identity practices that are fertile with crisis, we are exploring what can be learned from a study of these specific representations.

The three main objectives of this research are:

1. to establish a corpus of thirty films from independent cinemas of the multiracial and multicultural countries of Canada, South Africa, and Australia
2. to gain an understanding of the significant factors representing identity practices of center and peripheral groups within the three target countries. This will be achieved by analyzing the epistemological markers of the films as well as interviewing ten of the filmmakers
3. to compare historical and ideological foundations represented in these films through their articulations of identity and racial identity practices.

This project is financed by SSHRC from 2007 until 2010.