A student research podcast · est. 2026
Objectionable catalogues banned and censored cinema — country by country, ruling by ruling — and asks who decided, and why.
dir. Tian Zhuangzhuang
A family drama threaded through the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution — and the reason its director was barred from making films for the better part of a decade. We trace what the state objected to, and what survived in the edit.
dir. Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud
An animated memoir of girlhood after the 1979 revolution, pulled from cinemas and a regional television broadcast. A case study in how a single coming-of-age story becomes a diplomatic incident.
dir. Stanley Kubrick
Not banned by the state — withdrawn by its own director for twenty-seven years. We use it to ask a harder question: what counts as censorship when the hand doing the cutting is the filmmaker’s own?
Method · 8 min read
State prohibition, refused classification, distributor shelving, self-withdrawal — four very different fates often filed under one word. A working taxonomy for the project.