The premise of this piece is that what some still insist on calling the “revolution” of 1989 reverberated into a new type of film, in which anxieties caused by the new socio-political realities of the post-Soviet era were reflected in a new imaginary, literally a new vision, that is in an important way ‘European.’ Following Barry Langford’s processural understanding of genre, I am interested in the emergence, “the social” to speak with Gledhill, the “making” in the socio-historical, cultural and economic rather than film-making sense, of a distinct strand of cinema: grungy yet stylish, youth-oriented, urban films able to achieve more than a modicum of global popularity in no small part due to their protagonists, who are depicted as somehow managing to get ahead despite being positioned as part of the growing underclass needed to service new forms of the disorganized global finance capitalism theorized by John Urry and Scott Lash. Films like La femme Nikita (Luc Besson, 1990), Lola Rennt (Tom Tykwer, 1998) and Yamakasi (Ariel Zeitoun and Julien Seri, 2001) appeal to, and harness, creative and political energies by interfacing the urban and the global, which one could term the ‘gl-urban,’ echoing the ‘glocal’ terminology of globalization studies. This can be distinguished from the new impulses from different reconfigurations of revived realist traditions that European cinema received during the same period, which offer relatively straightforward social commentaries on difficult, often ethnic working and living conditions – for which La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) has become paradigmatic (see Mueller) – and also to be distinguished from the seductive, violent nihilism of films like Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) and Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996), which lack historical or utopian potential. Those who have made these films have recognized that they are in control of a key means of symbolic production, which, as Sharon Zukin explains in The Cultures of Cities, is increasingly the motor of urban economies. These filmmakers work against the aestheticization of diversity and fear by politicizing it in their films in a way that attributes agency to marginalized individuals rather than depicting them simply as ticking time bombs against which the mainstream needs to protect itself.