This course is an interdisciplinary introduction to the relationship between cinema and world politics and culture beginning with the 1902 groundbreaking Le Voyage dans la Lune by Georges Méliès in France, followed by the American D.W. Griffith and his 1915 seminal film The Birth of a Nation. The purpose of the course is to understand the international cinema connection to some broad contemporary themes – nationalism, conflict, globalization, colonization-decolonization, security-insecurity, and, most profoundly, politics of identity based on ideology, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality. We will examine each of these themes through the lens of film theory, world cinema, and Hollywood industry. Through lectures, discussions, film screenings and classroom presentations we will analyze the ways in which cinema has represented and constructed the world at large and around us – at times realistically or satirically, at other times, fantastically and ideologically.