This book includes essays from experts in the road movie genre and well-established scholars of French and European Cinema. This is the first collection of essays about French-language road movies, a particularly rich yet critically neglected cinematic category. These films, the contributors argue, offer important perspectives on contemporary French ideas about national identity, France's former colonies, Europe, and the rest of the world. Taken together, the essays illustrate how travel and road motifs have enabled directors of various national origins and backgrounds to re-imagine space and move beyond simple oppositions such as Islam and secularism, local and global, home and away, France and Africa, and East and West. The films covered in this collection represent timely and complex interventions in the current "identity debates" raging in France, while also offering a variety of approaches to the road movie format, worthy of study as a discrete and increasingly popular genre.