Professor of Film and Screen Studies
Introduction
Dr Deborah Shaw is Professor of Film and Screen Studies at the University of Portsmouth.
Her research interests include transnational film theory, Latin American cinema, film and migration, and screen studies and gender and sexuality, and she has published widely in these areas.
About
Deborah Shaw is the founding co-editor of the Routledge journal Transnational Screens and her books include Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Ten Key Films, (Continuum Publishers, 2003), The Three Amigos: The Transnational Filmmaking of Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón, Manchester University Press (2013).
Co-edited books include The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro. Palgrave Macmillan, (2014), and Latin American Women Filmmakers: Production, Politics, Poetics, Bloomsbury (2017), and Sense8: Transcending Television Bloomsbury Publishers (2021, 2022)..
Recent Articles
My Research
My principal areas of research have fallen into three areas: Latin American cinema, cinema and migration, transnational film theory and representations of Latinos and Latin Americans in Hollywood film, and gender sexuality and screen studies.
The Three Amigos
The transnational filmmaking of Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón
Now available in paperback, this is the first academic book dedicated to the filmmaking of the three-best known Mexican-born directors, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuarón.
Deborah Shaw examines the career trajectories of the directors and presents a detailed analysis of their most significant films with a focus on both the texts and the production contexts in which they were made. These include studies on del Toro's Cronos/Chronos, El laberinto del fauno/Pan's Labyrinth, and Hellboy II: The Golden Army; Iñárritu's Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel; and Cuarón's Sólo con tu pareja/Love in the Time of Hysteria, Y tu mamá también, and Children of Men.
The Three Amigos will be of interest to all those who study Hispanic and Spanish cinema in particular, and world and contemporary cinema in general.
The Home Secretary has made it patently clear that she doesn’t want even a modest number of asylum seekers arriving in the UK – pledging to “protect our borders” from those fleeing war and famine.
Through such language, asylum seekers are cast as dangerous ‘crimmigrants’ – a narrative repeated by much of the right-wing tabloid press. Indeed, a study by Cardiff University found that the British tabloids are the most negative in Europe towards asylum seekers, refugees and migrants. As a result, it has become harder for people to witness asylum seekers in their full humanity: as desperate people, attempting to escape desperate circumstances.
Cinema holds a privileged position in being able to counter this distorted image –redrawing our understanding of people who are disparaged in other areas of public life. Ironically, fiction often presents a more truthful picture than supposedly factual news. Through film, we can appreciate the lives and the stories of people who are otherwise seen as political targets or troublesome statistics.
Limbo, directed by Ben Sharrock, conforms to this idea. It has won multiple awards and is currently available to stream on Mubi, the curated art film streaming platform.