This paper examines the use of stereotypes in Boaz Davidson’s Bourekas trilogy (Charlie and a Half, Snooker, and The Tzanaani Family) and argues that these films employ what I term the “unstable stereotype.” While Bourekas films have often been dismissed as relying on simplistic and degrading ethnic caricatures, I argue that Davidson’s films complicate the conventional function of stereotype by oscillating between cognitive familiarity and estranging excess and incongruence. Drawing on the conflicting interpretations of Bourekas cinema offered by scholars such as Judd Ne’eman, Ella Shohat, and Rami Kimchi, I suggest that Davidson’s stereotypes simultaneously facilitate recognition while undermining the viewer’s confidence in those very schematic constructions. I identify two central mechanisms through which this instability is produced: excess and incongruence. Excess emerges when stereotypical depictions become exaggerated to the point of intellectual or affective disturbance, often through grotesque corporeality, stylistic overstatement, or eruptions of violence that disrupt the films’ comedic register. Incongruence appears through details that resist assimilation into the stereotype itself, such as contradictory character traits, unexpected details, or abrupt tonal shifts. Through close readings of key scenes across the trilogy, I demonstrate how Davidson repeatedly moves viewers between immersion and Brechtian distance. Situating Davidson’s trilogy within broader traditions of cinematic Modernism, I argue that the unstable stereotype functions as a distinctly Modernist device, an insight that enables me to trace the legacy of this device in the work of contemporary Israeli auteurs such as Amos Gitai, Nadav Lapid, and Eran Kolirin, whose films similarly employ stereotypes as tools of estrangement and aesthetic disruption.
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on 24 February 2022, has produced an unusual condition for film genre theory. A war of existential consequence is unfolding in near real-time proximity to its audiovisual representation, and Ukrainian filmmakers have been working inside that compressed temporal frame from the first weeks. This study examines Ukrainian wartime cinema released between 2022 and 2025 as a privileged site for thinking about the relation between afilmic reality and diegetic construction in the Souriau-Buckland model of filmic reality (Buckland 47), and proposes the analytical concept of emergency genre, a generic formation produced under conditions in which the temporal interval between event and representation, normally constitutive of genre crystallization, has effectively collapsed. The analytical procedure draws on five operationalized levels of the Souriau-Buckland model (afilmic, profilmic, filmographic, screenic, diegetic), applied to a corpus of fourteen feature documentaries and fictions. The corpus includes Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days in Mariupol (2023) and 2000 Meters to Andriivka (2025), Mantas Kvedaravičius’s Mariupolis 2 (2022), Maksym Nakonechnyi’s Butterfly Vision (2022), Roman Liubyi’s Iron Butterflies (2023), Ivan Ostrochovský and Pavol Pekarčík’s Photophobia (2023), Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted (2024), Oleh Sentsov’s Real (2024), Maciek Hamela’s In the Rearview (2023), and Kateryna Gornostai’s Timestamp (2025). Each film is read at five levels, with attention to genre signals and to platform-mediated reception ensured by Ukrainian SVOD services (Megogo, Sweet.tv, Kyivstar TV) and by international platforms (Netflix, PBS Frontline, Dogwoof, MUBI, Apple TV). The analysis identifies five emerging configurations of the corpus, of which three are central: eyewitness urgency, embedded combat realism, and hybrid juxtaposition. Two further configurations, mosaic observation and pre-war fictional inversion, complete the typology. The study argues that under wartime conditions cultural and generic verisimilitude (Neale) become locally inseparable, and that the streaming layer reshapes their negotiation for distinct audiences. Limits and implications for further work on AI-mediated audiovisuality are discussed.
The study critically examines the causes of the marginalization of director Mircea Săucan within Romanian cinema during the communist era, proposing an approach that moves beyond interpretations centered exclusively on the paradigm of political repression. The research is based on a diverse corpus of sources, including scholarly literature, Securitate files, the director’s filmography, post-1990 testimonies, interviews conducted by the author, and previously unpublished archival documents, among which his diploma thesis from VGIK is particularly noteworthy. Existing literature has primarily explained Săucan’s marginalization through the tension between his modernist aesthetics and the norms of socialist realism, as well as through his conflictual relationship with the cultural institutions of the regime. This study does not reject these interpretations but seeks to expand the analytical framework by integrating the early biographical dimension and institutional and professional dynamics, which have been insufficiently correlated in previous research. The analysis indicates that the director’s marginalization results from the interaction between his aesthetic choices, often incompatible with the norms of official film production, his limited adaptation to the institutional mechanisms of the film industry, and certain biographical factors associated with experiences during the Second World War and the Holocaust. These elements are treated as interpretive contextual factors, without establishing direct causal relationships between biography and subsequent conflicts with communist cultural institutions. The study proposes an integrative perspective on the case, correlating the aesthetic, institutional, biographical, and historical dimensions of his artistic trajectory, without resorting to deterministic explanations.
This paper analyses gender, sexual, ethnic and age related stereotypes used in three recent Romanian films, representative for commercially successful cinema. These films, which dominate the Romanian box office, distributed by major online platforms like Netflix, are indicating a mutation in popular culture changing cinema practices. While exploiting “old” stereotypes about age, race, gender and sexuality, the makers of these commercially appreciated films are contributing to the creation of imaginary structure with potential negative impact. Placed in a wider context, such narratives carrying strong elements of racism and sexism, coupled with other forms of discrimination, are exploitative representations which cultivate a shallow and reductive vision of society, one in which belittling social and gender categories is made acceptable. While such “old” comedic mechanisms, in which age, conflicts of generations or class, gender, race or ethnicity, and other individual or collective differences are stimulating humor, these movies also induce a specific form of visual and narrative representation which can be connected to more noxious forms of discrimination that have political consequences. The main corpus of interpretation is based on three of the most successful box office productions—*Mentorii* (2025), directed by Adrian Tapciuc, a television director making his debut in cinema, *Căsătoria* (2024), the directorial debut of comedian Mihai Bendeac; and *Vecina* (2025), produced by popular influencer and stand-up comedian turned filmmaker, Mircea Bravo. Using as reference point previously successful films, which the authors considers to indicate a shift in Romanian film industry, the paper discusses the role of influencers and stand-up comedians in this trend. The interpretation, based on content and narrative analysis of stereotypical representations, uses the distinctions between “Old Comedy” and “New Comedy” in the history of drama. Together with the Greimasian model of the semiotic quadrangle, the author analyses the production of racist and gendered tropes and their inner mechanisms. From ancient comedy to modern humor, these mechanisms which attract audiences by means of narrative and visual stereotypes, are changing our contemporary society, having strong political meanings.
Coined by Andreu Domingo, ‘demodystopias’ refer to a specific subset of dystopias “that make population matters a salient concern” (“Demodystopias” 725) and, as such, are drawn to read societies through demographic variables, particularly age. In these narratives, external stressors (e.g., the scarcity of life-sustaining resources such as food) call forth measures that are both radical and deeply unsettling, thereby foregrounding the dystopian worldbuilding of such fictions. Showcasing an especially horrendous possibility, certain demodystopias present age-based genocide, framed by authorities as a ‘civic duty’ that must be fulfilled—usually by older adults—to ensure the survival of younger generations. This article delivers a comparative study based on two such filmic demodystopias, the American science fiction Logan’s Run (Michael Anderson, 1976) and the Hungarian-Slovakian science fiction animation White Plastic Sky (Tibor Bánóczki and Sarolta Szabó, 2023). As I’ll argue—with the interdisciplinary support of science fiction studies, demographic research, and cultural gerontology—these films are heavily marked by the afilmic realities of demographic and age-related anxieties, which not only influence the building of these dystopian worlds, but concurrently push these films to position the possibility of growing older as a utopian prospect.
