Hollywood’s got competition

Globalization is all the rage on American movie screens this awards season. Blood Diamond, Babel, The Queen and The Last King of Scotland all tried to bring Hollywood’s touch to the far-flung corners of the world and look at the different ways that cultures can interact and collide. Clint Eastwood examined a pivotal conflict for Americans through the eyes of their adversaries in Letters from Iwo Jima. And, of course, Borat showed Americans what their own society looks like from the perspective of a Kazakh. Sort of.

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While the interest in the outside world is a healthy change of pace, as film critic Manohla Dargis points out in the New York Times this weekend, something is still lost when looking at a culture or country from the outside, rather than through its own eyes. Fortunately, the rest of the world is getting better at depicting itself on the silver screen. Europe has always had its own movie industry, and India’s Bollywood is legendary for its prolific production of interminable song-and-dance extravaganzas. But until recently, most other countries have had little in the way of truly popular domestic film industries. In this week’s List, FP takes a look at countries whose movie businesses, each in their own unique way, are coming into their own. Check it out.