Social Change?! The Status of Women's Film Festivals Today

Keynote at the Film Festivals in Dialog event at the IFFF - Internationales FrauenFilmFestival Dortmund|Köln 17.-22. April 2012 in Cologne, Germany

Spotlight on Film Festivals in Ukraine Today: Accounts, Responses, Calls to Action

This roundtable begins with each festival organizer explaining how the outbreak of the current war in Ukraine affected the planning and organizing of their respective film festivals. The discussion that unfolds conveys that the festival organizers stand quite united in their responses to the situation, despite differences in geographic proximity to ongoing hostilities on the ground and opportunities available for drafting up alternative scenarios. They engage in cultural diplomacy and collaborate with international colleagues to create visibility for Ukrainian culture and people. Moreover, there is a shared belief in the need for a boycott of Russian culture. The edited transcript presents detailed argumentation in favor of the Russian cultural boycott as well as responses to concrete issues that had media coverage. Other themes discussed concern the role cinema and film festivals can play in the face of war. The participants acknowledge the trauma that is being inflicted on the Ukrainian people and express hope that safety will be restored quickly, for this is a basic condition necessary to start thinking about and giving substance to the role of cinema and film festivals in dealing with the trauma of war

Re-Framing the Picture: An International Comparative Assessment of Gender Equity Policies in the Film Sector: Full Report Gender Equity Policy (GEP) Analysis Project

Re-Framing the Picture presents research from the “Gender Equity Policy (GEP) Analysis” project. Building on a substantial corpus of studies and data evidencing the long history of gender inequity in the international film sector, the international team of researchers located in Germany, the UK and Canada has designed an innovative, interdisciplinary approach with the aim to “assess, understand, and model the impact of gender equity policies (GEP) in the film industry”. To re-frame the picture of gender equity in film industries, they studied the policies, practices and norms that constrain equitable industry structures. The report presents in-depth insights from three different perspectives: The Policies, the Number, and the Networks. The researchers combine an in-depth analysis of existing gender equity policies, using a specifically designed policy analysis framework and interviews with industry experts, with a quantitative analysis that looks more closely at industry data and the structures it reveals. Finally, a social network approach helps understand how different interventions might reduce the dominance of men in the three case film industries (Germany, the UK and Canada) by modelling the impact of hypothetical policies. They find that 1) fighting gender inequity remains a long-haul endeavour, 2) no one-size-fits-all solution exists, 3) policies need to be intentional and structural, 4) and we should expand the reach of policies that make access to, for instance, funding or awards nominations dependent on progress towards gender equity

Teaching European cinema: The European University Film Award (EUFA) project – dossier

The “Teaching European Cinema” dossier has grown out of the European University Film Award (EUFA) project that was initiated in 2016 by Filmfest Hamburg in collaboration with the European Film Academy (EFA) and the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS). In its second edition in 2017, the EUFA connected twenty European universities in a common teaching project in which five nominated films were analysed and discussed in courses of the respective universities. Subsequently, one student representative per country joined the three-day student jury deliberation in Hamburg and voted for the final EUFA winner. In 2016, Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake (2016) won the inaugural EUFA; in 2017, Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s Heartstone (Hjartasteinn, 2016) was awarded the prize. The dossier works on different levels: first, it aims to present the EUFA project to a wider public; second, it promotes an exchange among the participating colleagues; and third, it operates as a teaching dossier for scholars within the wider field of European film and media studies to discuss questions of how best to teach contemporary European cinema

Using a Feminist and Inclusive Approach for Gender Identification in Film Research

Abstract and poster of paper 0790 presented at the Digital Humanities Conference 2019 (DH2019), Utrecht , the Netherlands 9-12 July, 2019

Using a Feminist and Inclusive Approach for Gender Identification in Film Research

Abstract and poster of paper 0790 presented at the Digital Humanities Conference 2019 (DH2019), Utrecht , the Netherlands 9-12 July, 2019

Intellectual Networks and Cultural Networks: Kinomatics and the complex cultural geometry of cinema

Abstract of paper 1010 presented at the Digital Humanities Conference 2019 (DH2019), Utrecht , the Netherlands 9-12 July, 2019