Transcultural Screenwriting

Book excerpt: The world in which we live and work today has created new working conditions where storytellers, screenwriters and filmmakers collaborate with colleagues from other countries and cultures. This involves new challenges regarding the practice of transcultural screenwriting and the study of writing screenplays in a multi-cultural environment. Globalisation and its imperatives have seen the film co-production emerge as a means of sharing production costs and creating stories that reach transnational audiences. Transcultural Screenwriting: Telling Stories for a Global World provides an interdisciplinary approach to the study of screenwriting as a creative process by integrating the fields of film and TV production studies, screenwriting studies, narrative studies, rhetorics, transnational cinema studies, and intercultural communication studies. The book applies the emerging theoretical lens of ‘transcultural studies’ to open new perspectives in the debate around notions of transnationalism, imperialism and globalisation, particularly in the screenwriting context, and to build stronger links across academic disciplines. This volume combines methods for studying, as well as methods for doing. It draws on case studies and testimonials from writers from all over the globe including South America, Europe and Asia. Transcultural Screenwriting: Telling Stories for a Global World is characterised by its scope, broad relevance, and emphasis on key aspects of screenwriting in an international environment.