The emergence of motion pictures and the phenomenon of world migrations are profoundly interrelated: their threads span from social and economic history to racial politics and film aesthetics. The historical appearance of moving pictures in the West coincided, in fact, with an increasing network of commercial transactions and movement of goods and peoples that connected industrially developed countries with each other and with underdeveloped ones. Over the past half-century, migration patterns have followed ever more complicated geographical routes. As such they have more broadly and radically affected contemporary media geography and film poetics even though migrations per se have not had a comparably transformative impact on all national film cultures. Still, the world's film cultures, when read through the lens of migration, reveal overlooked historical junctures and inform fruitful revisionist takes, particularly with regard to national cinemas’ past and future significance.      Keywords:    capitalism,  cultural diversity,  cross-cultural,  development