Shyam Benegal is widely perceived as one of the most influential Indian filmmakers, yet his voluminous body of work remains relatively under-studied in contemporary film scholarship.

To help fill this critical lacuna, ReFocus: The Films of Shyam Benegal undertakes a closer look at Benegal's films, a trailblazing auteur who successfully redefined the contours of non-commercial Hindi language cinema. This addition to ReFocus: The International Directors Series will consider how Benegal, over the course of his forty year career, used cinema as a potent medium to narrate the story of a nation in continuous transition.

The thirteen essays in the volume will explore how Benegal's films articulate his concerns over caste, class, gender, religion, and other allied social, economic and political problems characterizing the Indian subcontinent. This collection also includes a full-length interview with Shyam Benegal that investigates his perspectives on the art of film-making.

The nimble, creative spirit of Québécois screenwriter and filmmaker, Denis Villeneuve, is reflected in his varied body of work. Villeneuve explores questions of alterity and interculturality, of language and identity, of memory and forgetting, of violence and retribution, throughout his filmography: 'Un 32 août sur terre' (1998), 'Maelström' (2000), 'Polytechnique' (2009), 'Incendies' (2010), 'Enemy' (2013), 'Prisoners' (2013), 'Sicario' (2015), 'Arrival' (2016), 'Blade Runner 2049' (2017) and 'Dune: Part 1' (2021).This edited collection brings together original works of scholarship on all of Villeneuve's feature films from different theoretical approaches, in order to deepen our understanding of this important and yet relatively understudied director; read individually or as a collective whole, these studies reveal important elements of Villeneuve's filmic practice, as well as the evolutions of his oeuvre.

Ken Russell was among the most provocative, creative, original and important directors in British film and television history but his career and legacy have long suffered under the media clichés of 'Madman' or 'Enfant Terrible' of British cinema - nicknames which have tended to delegitimise his status and pioneering role in post-war film and television culture.

This scholarly edited collection refuses these terms and aims to not only reflect and further current critical research into Russell's work but to see Russell as the Renaissance man of British cinema. It brings together the work of new and established scholars as well as the reflections of those who knew and worked with Russell. ReFocus: The Films of Ken Russell offers new perspectives across the breadth of Russell's extensive career in television, film and other mediums, and seeks to better understand not only his reception, but the importance of collaboration to his practice, and the legacy of the man himself.

Angelidi's work has become synonymous with Greek Experimental Cinema, while her films and her theoretical writings have been the subject of numerous film courses, critical essays and retrospectives. The inversion and juxtaposition of codes, as well as the dream-mechanism and the uncanny, comprise her main creative strategies. The complexity of cinematic heterogeneity and the narrative multiplicity of different filmic elements which characterize her work are examined in depth in this edited collection dedicated to Antoinetta Angelidi's oeuvre.