This article examines cinematic treatments of intercultural encounters set in spaces which challenge fixed national and historical conceptualizations of identity and animosity. THE BAND’S VISIT dramatizes the encounter between a police band from Alexandria, Egypt, and the inhabitants of a small, peripheral town in the Southern desert of Israel, who have forever been longing for some exciting turn in the course of their barren lives. The desert- an iconographic cinematic space for negotiations of identity- becomes a symbolic site for a quest for authenticity and personally meaningful lives on both “sides” of the historical national adversity between Egyptians and Israelis. In LOST IN TRANSLATION, Americans in Tokyo get lost in translation not only across cultural, lingual and national barriers, but within their own families and inter-personal relations. In the media saturated and consumerist postmodern urban environment constructed in the film, the very notion of culturally or nationally valid boundaries is ironically challenged. The intercultural, diasporic spaces in both films negotiate cultural identity in a world where homogeneity and image replace traditional identifications on the one hand, and exilic identifications create bonds across historical national borders on the other. In those “stateless states” both films create, past visions of national, ethnic, generational and gender identity dissolve; they are replaced by liminal and contradictory spaces, in which the human condition of forlornness, foreignness, and alienation is accompanied by a deep yearning for origins, ties, and communication across obsolete boundaries.