Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Isabelle McNeill for providing me with a precious model for student mentorship, and for supporting me throughout my doctoral research. Isabelle was the kind of supervisor every student hopes to be lucky enough to have — brilliant, generous, and caring. Thank you also to Emma Thompson, Martin Crowley, and Karl Schoonover, whose engagement and vital feedback I was always able to count on.

At various stages of writing, I was supported and inspired by friends, family, and colleagues: thank you to Eóin Phillips, Marta Cenedese, Sergio Jarillo, Harry Adamson, Simon Patterson, Mantas Kvedaravičius, Irene Peano, Matthew Flanagan, Laura McMahon; Walid El Houri, Zairong Xiang, James Burton, Antonio Castore, Clio Nicastro, Saima Akhtar, and the entire 2014–2016 cohort of ICI Fellows at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin. My gratitude also goes to the staff at ICI Berlin Press, particularly Christoph Holzhey, Arnd Wedemeyer, Manuele Gragnolati, and Louisa Elderton, and most of all, to Claudia Peppel, as well as to their freelance copyeditor Bill Roberts. Thank you to my family and friends in Thessaloniki; and to my partner, Paolo De Guidi.

I am also grateful to Pedro Costa and Albert Serra for their generous conversations with me.

This book was written thanks to support from the ICI Berlin, a scholarship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK, and the A. G. Leventis Foundation, Darwin College, University of Cambridge. The author received funding from PNRR Next Generation EU in the context of the project IMFilm, Cinema Beyond the Industry: Contemporary Italian Minoritized Film Culture, conducted at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (PI: Rosa Barotsi, 2022–2025, finanziato dall’Unione Europea — Next Generation EU, Missione 4 Componente 2 Investimento 1.2 CUP E93C22002670001).