Newsletter 1/2010 for the Film Festival Research Network (FFRN)
February 26, 2010
Dear Colleagues,
Our network is continuously growing. There are now more than 150 individuals gathered in the network who receive the newsletter and hopefully gain from the exchange within the network. Welcome to those who have newly joined and receive the newsletter for the first time. Furthermore, we are pleased to announce a few new materials and invite those of you attending this year’s SCMS conference to an informal get-together.
#1 FFRN online bibliography updated
#2 Second volume of the Film Festival Yearbook available
#3 SCMS with strong presence of film festival research
#4 Informal get-together of festival researchers at SCMS, Thursday, March 18, 2010
#1 FFRN online bibliography updated
In the last newsletter, we have asked you to help us with suggestions and additions for the FFRN bibliography on film festival research. We are pleased to announce that the second edition of the “Film Festival Research: Thematic, Annotated Bibliography” is now available online. For your convenience, we have kept the old URL: http://www1.uni-hamburg.de/Medien//berichte/arbeiten/0091_08.html. The content, however, has been updated and carries now approximately 100 additional entries.
#2 Second volume of the Film Festival Yearbook available
The second volume of the Film Festival Yearbook, launched by Dina Iordanova and her colleagues at the University of St. Andrews, has just come out and is now available for purchase via http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/filmbooks. If you would like to review the book for a journal, please contact Ruby Cheung at filmbooks@st-andrews.ac.uk.
Please see below for information on the book.
Film Festival Yearbook 2: Film Festivals and Imagined Communities
Edited by Dina Iordanova with Ruby Cheung
St Andrews Film Studies, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9563730-1-4 (paperback)
Price: £17.99 (UK), $29.00 (US)
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/filmbooks
Film Festivals are usually associated with big cities’ most glamorous sites where celebrities showcase designer-branded outfits on miles of red carpet, all lit up by press flashlights. But how about the other film festivals, those organised by minority groups for minority audiences? How about the festivals that do not trade in glamour but focus on a variety of political and social agendas instead? There are the UK’s largest African film festival held annually in Edinburgh, the Migrant Worker Film Festival in South Korea, or the festivals set up by ethnic minority or human rights activists to cater to displaced populations in the Sahara or promote stateless Kurdish culture in the diaspora, as well as grand showcases staged by wealthy industrialised nations in extension of their cultural diplomacy efforts. These film festivals may be far from the limelight, yet in creating live encounters they bring together a host of imagined communities and are of at least equal importance in regard to our understanding of the dynamics in the global circulation of cinema.
Film Festivals and Imagined Communities (2010), the second volume of the Film Festival Yearbook from St Andrews Film Studies, comes timely to shed light on these issues. This latest volume brings together essays about festivals that use international cinema to facilitate transnationally ‘imagined communities’ for diverse socio-cultural-ethnic interactions in a vast range of places, from Vienna, San Francisco, and Havana to Seoul, Bradford, and Dakhla. The ‘Contexts’ section includes texts highlighting aspects of festival organisation, cultural policies, and funding models, as well as analysing programming practices related to these often highly politicised events.
The diverse range of contributors and contributions to the volume reflect the series’ transnational focus. Authors include Ruby Cheung, Lindiwe Dovey, Michael Guillén, Yun Mi Hwang, Dina Iordanova, Miriam Ross, Isabel Santaolalla and Stefan Simanowitz, Mustafa Gündoğdu, Jérôme Segal, and Roy Stafford. The book features the 2009 update of the film festival research bibliography by Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck, and an extensive thematically-organised listing of a variety of transnational festivals.
‘The very ambitious aspiration of the Film Festival Yearbook is, quite literally, to define a new area of film study.’
– Jonathan Rosenbaum (www.jonathanrosenbaum.com)
‘Film Festivals and Imagined Communities – the second volume in the series – opens up new horizons both for those who study media and those who create the significant but often overlooked “media worlds” where films first get launched: film festivals from the “periphery”.’
– Faye Ginsburg (Director, Center for Media, Culture and History, New York University)
Review copies of Film Festival Yearbook 2: Film Festivals and Imagined Communities will be sent to various internationally renowned journals with global circulation, including Cineaste, Screen, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Journal of Popular Film and TV, Film Criticism, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Senses of Cinema, Positif, and more.
About the editors:
Dina Iordanova has built an academic career as a specialist on the cinema of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Her more recent work is focused on business models and distribution patterns within the international film industries. She is Director of the Centre for Film Studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where she leads The Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘Dynamics of World Cinema’ (www.st-andrews.ac.uk/worldcinema). She is also the publisher of the Film Festival Yearbook (FFY) series and writes DinaView.com. Her most recent work appears in Cinema at the Periphery (2010) and Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe (2010).
Ruby Cheung is The Leverhulme Trust Research Associate at the Centre for Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, where she works with the ‘Dynamics of World Cinema’ team. Her research interests include East Asian cinemas, Asian film industries, diasporic film distribution, regional and national film policy, Chinese diasporic on-line fandom and issues of film promotion. She is the editor of Cinemas, Identities and Beyond (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). Her latest work includes investigations into diasporic on-line fandom of epic cinema as well as an anthology on Asian film festivals.
#3 SCMS with strong presence of film festival research
The SCMS Conference to be held in LA from March 17-21, 2010 is fast approaching. There are 13 panels and workshops listed that include or focus on film festival research. Here is a quick overview of the relevant sessions and titles:
Wed, March 17
Session A 8:00 – 9:45 am
A8 Exhibition, Distribution, Marketing
A13 Genre and the Transnational: Audiovisual Futures in the Asia-Pacific
Session C 12:00 – 1:45 pm
C8 The Economics, Politics, and Art of Film Festivals
C13 Interrogating Queer Spaces in Asian Cinema
Session D 2:00 – 3:45 pm
D8 The Art and Politics of Film Festival Programming (workshop)
Session E 4:00 – 5:45 pm
E6 Films and Spectators in Non-theatrical Spaces
Thu, March 18
Session H 10:00 – 11:45 am
H13 Contemporary Asian Film Industries: Festivals, Markets and Other Cosmopolitan Spaces
Session I 12:00 – 1:45 pm
I1 Lost [and Found] in Translation: Translating, Remaking, and Redefining Asian Media for US Markets
** 8pm – informal get-together for film festival researchers at a bar near the conference center
Fri, March 19
Session L 8:00 – 9:45 am
L15 Film Festival Research Methodology (workshop)
Session N 2:00 – 3:45 pm
N6 Marketing Transnational Auteurism
Sat, March 20
Session Q 10:00 – 11:45 am
Q8 New Waves and Film Festivals: [Trans]National Negotiations
Session T 4:00 – 5:45 pm
T6 Film Festival as Archive: Toward Addressing History/ies in the Context of Film Festivals
T11 Cinema and Ecology II: Texts and Contexts
For further information, please check the SCMS website: http://www.cmstudies.org/documents/SCMS 2010 Conference Program-web.pdf
#4 Informal get-together of festival researchers at SCMS, Thursday, March 18, 2010, 8pm
Since so many festival researchers will be present at SCMS in LA, it would be nice to get that chance to talk to each other. Since the conference is very big and everybody will be very busy, I would like to suggest a time where anybody interested in meeting up can casually join an informal get-together on Thursday, March 18, 8 pm at a bar near the conference center.
Maybe someone on the list has a suggestion for a place, since I am not familiar with LA and the hotel complex?
Please RSVP to skadi.loist@uni-hamburg.de so that I can send directions once a place has been agreed upon.
If you have general questions and suggestions regarding FFRN, please email us. Also feel free to share information with the whole list. Stay in touch!
Kind regards,
Skadi Loist, Universität Hamburg (skadi.loist@uni-hamburg.de)
Marijke de Valck, University of Amsterdam (m.devalck@uva.nl)