MULTIPLE EXPOSURES: Mapping cross-cultural cinema by Neel Chaudhuri There is a growing tradition of cross-cultural cinema that uses storytelling to explore the schisms that separate us and the encounters that yoke us together. Where there is optimism, strangers become friends, and the ‘foreign’ familiar. In bleaker instances, the walls of fear and misunderstanding impede. Ignorance and stereotype persist in cross-cultural representation, not just in cinema but also in political ideology and journalism. The writer of this essay Neel Chaudhuri discusses the many films in this year’s Osian’s-Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema that confront ‘the other’ sometimes in an aspirational way, at others, like an anthropological exercise.