Cinema and Censorship

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue, Cinema and Censorship, invites interdisciplinary work that takes a fresh, critical look at how film censorship actually operates—its mechanisms, its histories, and the wide range of cultural effects it leaves behind. Cinema has long occupied a tricky, and sometimes uncomfortable, position at the crossroads of artistic expression, political authority, and social regulation. One could argue this has been true from the rowdy nickelodeon theaters of the early twentieth century to today's streaming platforms, where opaque algorithms quietly decide what circulates and what disappears. The current moment—shaped by the tightening of film legislation (Heng 2024) and the growing influence of algorithmic moderation (Khurana and Sharma 2025; Kusuma et al. 2025)—only underscores how urgently we need sustained scholarly attention to these dynamics.

Our focus is deliberately broad. We are interested in censorship not just as overt state prohibition but as a layered set of practices through which moving images are shaped, constrained, nudged, re-edited, or even unexpectedly enabled. These practices may include legal restrictions and pre-approval systems, but they also appear in more diffuse forms: market-driven self-regulation; the quiet social pressures that make certain topics “too risky”; or the anticipatory compromises filmmakers internalize before a script ever reaches a review board. As Biltereyst and Vande Winkel (2013) note, censorship tends to operate less like a single authority and more like a constellation of overlapping forces. Recent scholarship has also shown that these forces can, paradoxically, help generate new cultural forms—structuring distribution networks (Al-Qudah 2022), preserving suppressed films through translation or re-editing (Yoon 2025), or prompting filmmakers to devise unexpected aesthetic workarounds (Viernes 2021; Taheri 2024). This Special Issue aims to move past the old “repression versus resistance” framework and instead map the complex, sometimes surprising ways regulation and creativity interact.

We welcome contributions on a wide range of topics, including—but certainly not limited to—state censorship and production codes; self‑censorship and “complicit” creativity; censorship in authoritarian or post-authoritarian contexts; the policing of gender, sexuality, and identity; colonial and postcolonial censorship practices; digital platforms and algorithmic governance; the aesthetic life of censorship; and efforts to recover or restore banned, shelved, or partially lost works. The geographic scope is global, and we especially encourage work on Latin America, colonial and postcolonial Africa, indigenous filmmaking traditions, and other regions that remain underrepresented in English‑language scholarship.

Building on foundational studies such as Silencing Cinema (Biltereyst and Vande Winkel 2013) and The Screen Censorship Companion (Biltereyst and Mathijs 2024), this Special Issue hopes to bring together scholars from film studies, communication, sociology, law, and various areas, studies, or fields around questions that contemporary censorship debates are only beginning to address.

We ask that interested contributors first submit a proposed title and a 200–400-word abstract outlining their intended article by 25 August 2026. Please send the proposal to the Guest Editor (navarros@fiu.edu) or to the Arts Editorial Office (arts@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be evaluated to ensure a good fit with the Special Issue’s focus. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review.

References

Al-Qudah, I. 2022. "Censorship as enabling: Importing, distributing, and translating foreign films in the Arab Middle East." Heliyon 8(8): e09977. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e09977

Barros, Júlia Leitão de. 2022. Censura: A construção de uma arma política do Estado Novo. Lisbon: Tinta da China. https://doi.org/10.400.21/14918

Biltereyst, D., and R. Vande Winkel, eds. 2013. Silencing Cinema: Film Censorship around the World. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137061980

Biltereyst, D., and E. Mathijs, eds. 2024. The Screen Censorship Companion: Critical Explorations in the Control of Film and Screen Media. University of Exeter Press. ISBN 978-1-80413-066-7

Bunn, Matthew. 2015. "Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After." History and Theory 54(1): 25–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10739

Butler, Judith. 2021. "Implicit Censorship and Discursive Agency." In Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, 127–164. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003146759

Fang, J. 2024. "The culture of censorship: State intervention and complicit creativity in global film production." American Sociological Review 89(3): 488–517. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224241236750

Goerg, O. 2022. "The cinema, a place of tension in colonial Africa: Film censorship in French West Africa." Afrika Zamani: Journal of African History 15–16. https://doi.org/10.57054/az.vi15-16.1857

Heng, S. 2024. "Hong Kong's tightened film censorship and its implication on Hong Kong cinema." Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture 37(46): art. 4. https://doi.org/10.14746/i.2024.37.46.4

Kelly, C. 2022. "Beyond censorship: Goskino USSR and the management of Soviet film, 1963–1985." Slavonic and East European Review 99(3): 432–468. https://doi.org/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.99.3.0432

Khurana, U., and K. Sharma. 2025. "Censorship and self-regulation in Indian web series and OTT content." International Journal of Scientific Research in Engineering and Management 9(12). https://doi.org/10.55041/ijsrem54921

Kusuma, B. P., C. S. Efendy, and C. E. Santoso. 2025. "National legal frameworks and international challenges of Netflix regulation: Censorship, taxation, cross-border licensing." Progresif: Jurnal Hukum 24(1). https://doi.org/10.31941/pj.v24i1.7278

Ndanyi, S. K. 2021. "Film censorship and identity in Kenya." Film Quarterly 74(4). https://doi.org/10.5070/f742253948

Pradsmadji, S. I., and N. Mutmainnah. 2022. "Indonesian cinema: The battle over censorship." Ikat: Jurnal Ilmu Komunikasi dan Teknologi Informasi 6(1): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.22146/ikat.v6i1.71547

Taheri, H. 2024. "Compliance and resistance in Iranian cinema's censorship landscape: A new approach to analyzing Iranian films." Quarterly Review of Film and Video 41(2): 189–213. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2023.2294662

Viernes, N. 2021. "Restricted vision: Censorship and cinematic resistance in Thailand." Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 52(4): 632–653. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022463421000990

Yoon, M. 2025. "The survival of Aimless Bullet (Obaltan, 1961): Translation and Cold War censorship in South Korean cinema." Asian Studies Review. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2025.2498261

Prof. Dr. Santiago Juan-Navarro
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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