Theorizing liminal cinema: Unsettling the transnational spaces of Italian Indian co-productions

This article seeks to provide a contribution to the contemporary writing on transnational cinema. By acknowledging the prolific literature that characterizes transnational cinema through specific categories of cultural and societal mobilization, and the writing on crossover cinema, this work aims to enter into a dialogue with the respective authors and propose a less structured approach to transnational mobilization. To study such mobilizations and its complex forms, co-production ventures were used as case studies to highlight the efforts of early international joint endeavours, and more recently, those of outsourcing agencies, as being nodes for changing forms of international collaborations. By focusing on Italian Indian co-produced films, this work situates co-production studies within the literature on transnational cinema, and unsettles fixed cinematic categories in favor of a more mobile and fluid paradigm. Hence, the term Liminal cinema is proposed to critically assess and emphasize the dynamics of the complex phenomenon of transnational cinema-in-motion.