CFP: Symposium – Film Festivals – Borders, Identities, Solidarities (UNIVE, Nov. 4-6, 2024)

This symposium aims to explore how the issues of borders, identities and solidarities have been tackled by and through film festivals. As a repetitive practice happening in regular intervals and at the same place, film festivals operate as ‘places of memory’ of a particular kind (Nora, 1984 [1997]). As such, they provide an institutional framework for the cultural memories they preserve and produce through their programmes. By the default of cultural memory creation (Assmann, 1995), their influence becomes long-term and wide encompassing, moving far beyond from their actual time and place. In addition, thanks to the engagement of diverse festival actors (journalists, critics, industry representatives, politicians, etc.) the narratives that they create reach diverse categories of society, not limited to those present at the screening. The influence created in such a way becomes especially important in the times of political and military conflicts and social turbulences, when not only various kinds of liberties, but also people’s lives, can be threatened. With this in mind, this symposium aims to bring together scholars working on diverse aspects of film festival studies to discuss interrelations between film festivals and the questions of borders, identities and solidarities. In the current context of political and social upheavals, and social movements for civil rights, the symposium will explore the capacity of film festivals to operate not simply as spaces for cinematic representation related to borders and identities, but how they have (or may become) vehicles for forging solidarities, past, present and future.

We welcome submissions in the following (non-exhaustive) topic areas:

– Film festivals and political propaganda
– Film festivals as places for expression of solidarity
– Film festivals, cultural memory and national identity
– Film festivals and gender identity
– Definitions of film festivals’ identity
– Borderland film festivals
– Borders and boundaries in film festival programmes

Submissions may be individual or for panels of three papers. We are inviting proposals from participants from diverse ranges of career levels, from doctoral students to established scholars.

Please submit your proposals – 250-word abstracts for 20-minute presentations – to cba.trieste.symposium@gmail.com by July 5, 2024. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by August 15, 2024.

The symposium is organized by Dr Dunja Jelenkovic and Prof. Marco Dalla Gassa in the framework of the project CBA TRIESTE (The Cinematic Battle for the Adriatic: Films, Frontiers, and the Trieste Crisis) which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101020692 (MSCA-IF-EF).

For any inquiries, please contact dunja.jelenkovic@unive.it (please put “CBA TRIESTE Symposium“ as the email subject).