Mike Wayne and Deirdre O’Neill discuss their latest documentary film, The Condition of the Working Class, a film that brings Friedrich Engels to contemporary Manchester via the theatre stage. David Church puts the re-release of rediscovered adult films by ‘one of exploitation cinema’s foremost cult icons’, Herschell Gordon Lewis, in a cultural and economic context. Yjarvoe Jensen sees Hollywood’s craze for black male comedians in drag in the light of the history of the Mammy character on screen and stage, concluding that ‘[u]ltimately, the transvestite Mammy is a socially irresponsible caricature whether it’s performed by an African American or a white male comedic performer’. Matthew Sorrento finds an American form of French ‘extremism’ in what he labels ‘character-disaster films’, exemplifying with films such as Stuck, Buried, Take Shelter and Compliance. Murray Pomerance goes dog hunting in the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Giovanna Summerfield has interviewed Italian documentary film-maker Giovanna Taviani, daughter and niece respectively of the famous brothers Vittorio and Paolo Taviani. Towfiq Elahi looks at Bangladeshi cinema’s struggle to compete with Bollywood imports through the example of the 2009 success Monpura. Pallav Mukhopadhyay traces the representation of poverty in Hindi films from 1947 to the 1990s, chronicling how serious representation of the poor has disappeared from mainstream cinema whilst poverty and malnutrition, despite manipulated figures pretending the contrary, have grown worse in recent decades. This issue also includes a special section of articles, guest-edited by Paul Douglas Grant, presenting the cinema of the Philippine region of Cebu, whose capital, Cebu City, is the nation’s oldest city.

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