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  Where cultures cross swords on screen

  Vol. 1 No. 1 (2026)

          An inaugural issue declares far more than a field of inquiry; it establishes a method of attention. Cinematic Crossroadsbegins from the conviction that cinema reveals its deepest nature when it is placed under pressure from adjacent forms, social histories, and technological regimes. The "crossroads" named in the journal's title are not points of effortless reconciliation. They are sites of friction, where established definitions become unstable, inherited categories are questioned, and new possibilities emerge.
         Moving images have become more abundant than ever, yet the foundations upon which we place our trust in them have grown increasingly fragile. This issue speaks from within that condition. The central question running through these contributions moves beyond the surface inquiry of what cinema "represents" and turns instead toward how images establish authority: how they preserve memory, produce knowledge, construct relationships, and assume ethical responsibility.
         Several essays return to the relationship between image and reality. Documentary practice is approached as a complex encounter among the filmmaker, the subject, and the world being recorded, resisting any reduction to transparent documentation. The interview with Lin Xin presents cinema as a form of local memory and personal archive: to record a place is also to acknowledge the presence and responsibility of the recorder. Reflections on the unadorned image, the boundaries of documentary, and cinematic testimony similarly demonstrate that truth cannot be obtained merely through proximity to objective reality. It emerges through duration, physical closeness, contingency, and the conscious relinquishment of absolute control.
         Poetry forms another central concern of this issue. It sheds its status as an ornament attached to beautiful images and becomes instead a pathway through which cinema thinks. From the entanglement of poetry and film to the fragmented structures of Sixth Generation cinema, these essays explore how images can move beyond conventional narrative forms to reconstruct history, emotion, memory, and thought. The discussions of poetry film further clarify that poetic cinema refuses to be confined within a fixed genre. It exists precisely within the gaps between categories, where meaning remains open and continuously unfolding. A crossroads does not offer a final answer; it sustains an ongoing dialogue among heterogeneous possibilities.
         This issue also examines the tension between artistic creation and institutional conditions. Genre, authorship, and industry are not external forces imposed upon cinema; they are internal conditions through which cinematic meaning is produced. The localization and transformation of the Western genre, the collective authorship behind The Troubleshooters, and the changing relationship among Hollywood, Chinese-language cinema, and audiences all reveal the deep entanglement between cinematic forms and the systems that sustain them. The question of creativity is ultimately also a question of production, circulation, trust, and historical transformation.
         The exploration of the cross-cultural moves beyond a superficial celebration of exchange and dialogue. It demands historical specificity and critical awareness. Studies of Tibetan cinema, Macau's migration history, female agency, and regional identity demonstrate that representation is not merely a matter of visibility. It concerns how cinema enters living communities, how it negotiates unequal relations between speaking and being seen, and how inherited concepts respond to changing contemporary experiences.
         Finally, this issue turns toward the computational transformation of images. The transition from material recording to digital and AI-generated imagery does not erase cinema's long-standing debates concerning reality, authorship, and evidence. Instead, it intensifies them. When images become increasingly detached from physically recorded events, the crisis of trust becomes more urgent. The territory of the filmmaker consequently expands, becoming deeply entangled with systems, datasets, interfaces, and new networks of human machine collaboration.
         Cinematic Crossroads does not seek to resolve these tensions in advance. Its purpose is to make these fractures visible, creating a public space in which scholarship, criticism, testimony, and creative practice can encounter one another while preserving their differences. The inaugural issue does not proclaim a doctrine. Instead, it proposes a working proposition: cinema remains intellectually alive as long as its boundaries continue to be tested, its histories reopened, and its languages translated through friction.