Screening Justice

Book excerpt: "Screening Justice in Canada is a scholarly exploration of films that focus centrally on crime and justice in Canada. Defining Canadian crime films as those that focus significantly on crime and its consequences in Canadian society, the book is as much about the ways crime films provide vehicles for understanding what it means to be Canadian as it is about the depiction and representation of crime and justice in Canadian cinema and television. The films examined in this book span all regions of Canada and include case studies of films set in Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Nunavut, British Columbia's Lower Mainland, the Canadian prairies, Ontario, and Quebec. Moreover, Canadian crime films produced from the 1930s to the present are included in these analyses. Contributors to this multi-and interdisciplinary volume are drawn from Criminology, Criminal Justice Studies, English literature, Art History, Film Studies and Communications, Cultural Anthropology, Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies. This is the first comprehensive Canadian volume on crime films that takes up cultural criminology's call for more critical scholarly analyses of the interplay between crime, culture, and society. Adopting American criminologist Nicole Rafter's concept "popular criminology," the essays in this volume all take crime films seriously as popular efforts to understand the causes, consequences and meanings of crime in Canadian society."--