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I argue that the gay teenage coming-of-age films Love, Simon and Alex Strangelove enact two conservative gendered representations. First, both films portray a post-feminist, single-issue LGBTQ allyship which rationalizes a male-centered understanding of coming out at the expense of the girl best friend. Second, both movies display gendered spatial arrangements which reify problematic gender dynamics by physically displacing the girl best friend with the lead's new boyfriend. While both films ought to be celebrated for their portrayal of positive environments for closeted teenagers to come out into, they simultaneously deliver narratives which should be further investigated by rhetoricians and media theorists. This essay invites scholars to interrogate gay teenage coming-of-age movies to better understand coming out in the modern era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Butterfly (José Luis Cuerda, 1999) and Black Bread (Agustí Villaronga, 2010) are two films centered on children coming of age and the impact, respectively, of the war and postwar on that liminal process. Liminality shows that in times of uncertainty, mimesis is important vis-à-vis incorporation into the new state. René Girard illuminated how desire was not a romantic construction in terms of subject-object, but was mediated by a third factor that could usually generate rivalry and conflict. I analyze the mimetic conflictive operations in these films, which flourish during coming-of-age experiences in times of social crisis. Butterfly shows a sudden--much as the coup--mediation though deposition that incorporates the child into the Francoist communitas. In the case of Black Bread, this incorporation is gradual and operates in terms of putrefaction instead of deposition. These depictions read Franco's Spain as a monster-maker, a pledging society that both creates and accepts the monster-child as a peer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay positions the 2010 highest-grossing domestic film,Monga, in Taiwan's nativist discourses and teases out the alterity of queerness in the coming-of-age ‘buddy’ film. I contend thatMongadisengages from the narrative of ‘sadness’ (beiqing) which characterizes the Taiwan New Cinema in the late 1980s and New Wave Cinema in the 1990s. I read the queer element in the film as a trope for a tendency, as can be seen in other coming-of-age cultural productions after the millennium, to move past the dwelling over a homogenized colonial experience in Taiwan's contemporary historical narratives. As the diegesis of the film displaces the nostalgic search for one's cultural roots with a self-alienating subjectivity by a sublimation of homoeroticism, I posit thatMongaperforms a ‘patricide’ in its contestation of Taiwanese nationhood and gestures towards a transformative process constituted by self-estrangement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Adolescent girls in cinema have always been of interest to film directors, both men and women alike. The young girl has been a subject of predilection due to her ambiguous position, as no longer a child but not yet an adult. Over the years, film-makers have looked at this transitional state as a process of development, as the young girl evolves in the constricted familial and social spheres. In doing so, the cinema has worked as a reinforcement of the type of image of adolescent girls projected by dominant social discourses. As early as the 1970s, Catherine Breillat attacked conventional depictions of young girls and introduced a new type of coming-of-age film with Une vraie jeune fille/A Real Young Girl (1976), which explores issues of both socialization and self-exploration, further developed in her later works, 36 fillette/Virgin (1987) and A ma soeur/Fat Girl (2001). I will argue that in the early 2000s, this representation (based on the young girl's inner self) intensified, by addressing the example of Céline Sciamma's La Naissance des pieuvres/Water Lilies (2007), among others. In Sciamma's groundbreaking first film, parents and schools are absent, leaving the adolescent girls to evolve in the public but fluid (in the Irigarayan sense) sphere of the swimming pool. I propose to examine the connection between the image of the adolescent girl and the enclosed but personal and complex environment of the swimming pool to contend that Sciamma provides a new focus on adolescent girls' (self-)be-coming or birth (as suggested by the film's title). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cuban revolution drastically altered the country's socio-cultural calibration and from 1959 pleasure-seeking tourists made way for intellectual travellers keen to contribute to the revolutionary process. Jean-Paul Sartre arrived on the island in 1960, Allen Ginsberg followed in 1965; their experiences and observations couldn’t have been more different. Although explanation for this discrepancy could be sought in the ideological idiosyncrasies of the two writers, this essay argues that the island visited was not the same. Using a liminal ontology inherited from anthropology to explore the Cuban revolution as a rite of national passage, this essay hopes to illuminate some of the key contours of the island's shifting socio-cultural topography over five critical years of consolidation. Through the lenses offered by these two travelling writers, internal and external forces appear to propel revolutionary Cuba beyond a liminal period of archipelagic flux towards a more determinedly insular and strictly structured archetype by the mid-1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers the author's insights on the emergence of the New Taiwanese Cinema in 1980s, in times of economic crisis, the end of the Cold War and lifting of martial law. She says that Hou Hsiao-Hsien's movies were produced during the said period, including the trilogy of the film "Dust in the Wind." She states that the film was based on Hou's coming-of-age and serves as an artistic milestone. She suggests that what the film depicts is the idea of historiology.

This article explores the critical reassessment of one particularly prevalent ethnic stereotype in Turkish–German cinema: the stereotype of the oppressive Turkish partriarch. Comparing Yasemin (1988), a much-cited, early coming-of-age film made by German film-maker Hark Bohm, with three recent features made by young Turkish–German film-makers – Sülbiye Günar's Karamuk (2002), Ayse Polat's Tour Abroad and Züli Aladag's controversial Rage (2006) – it examines father–daughter and father–son relationships and traces how these films reaffirm or invert the clichéd image of the domineering Turkish father who is out of touch with German majority culture. Drawing on Kobena Mercer's concept of the dialogic imagination, the article investigates whether these cinematic representations of the vilified or idealized father promote social change through ‘a multiplication of critical dialogues’ or whether they simply reiterate dominant ‘discourses of domination’ (Mercer 2003). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors discuss effective rite of passage (ROP) programs as strength-based, culturally relevant interventions for African American male adolescents. They also highlight the ethnocultural strengths of this population from a resilience perspective and articulate academic and dispositional outcomes of ROP programs. Recommendations for practice and future research are included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the motion picture "Alma's Rainbow," directed by Ayoka Chenzira. It is explained that the motion picture chronicles the lives of three women, and at its most simplistic interpretation it is a coming of age story. The article asserts that the motion picture explores the contradictions and pitfalls of several models for negotiating the ideological tensions that arise in the search for happiness in life, love, and finances. It is suggested that "Alma's Rainbow" demonstrates that most paths are filled with some sort of risk, while others should not be pursued under any circumstance.

The article presents an interview with Icelandic filmmaker Baldvin Zophoníasson in which he discusses his coming-of-age film "Jitters." He discusses his experience working in a variety of formats such as commercials, music videos, and short films; the film's relationship to the British television show "Skins"; and the film's score by composer Ólafur Arnalds. Other topics include casting, cinematography and the homosexuality of the film's protagonist, Gabríel.