Documentary Film Festivals Vol 2

This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the global landscape of documentary film festivals, looking at its contemporary and future challenges. Contributors from across the globe reflect on how documentary has positioned itself within both internationally renowned and more alternative festivals, including IDFA (Netherlands), Cannes IFF (France), Sheffield Doc/Fest (UK), Dockanema (Mozambique), Ismailia (Egypt) and Zinebi (Basque Country, Spain), among others. With a special focus on industrial and curatorial developments, this second in a two-volume set looks at recent changes occurred in the festival circuit, such as the proliferation of markets and co-production forums, the inclusion of interactive and VR forms within their programs and the irruption of VOD platforms, and analyse how these affect the future of documentary aesthetics and its production/distribution contexts. This volume is organized in two sections: the first reflects on how the documentary festival circuit has become a key industry node for contemporary documentary and identifies new curatorial trends at documentary and major film festivals. The second gives voice to professionals working for festivals and institutions who collaborate with them, who share inside knowledge and concerns, regarding the future challenges to be faced by documentary in the near future.

This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the global landscape of documentary film festivals. Contributors from across the globe offer in-depth analysis of both internationally renowned and more alternative festivals, including Hot Docs (Canada), Nyon (Switcherland), Yamagata (Japan), DocChina, Full Frame (US), Belgrade (former Yugoslavia), Vikalp (India), and DocsBarcelona (Catalonia, Spain), among others. With a special focus on historical and political developments, this first volume draws a map of documentary festivals operating today, and then looks at their origins and evolution. This volume is organized in three sections: the first addresses methodological problems film historians and social scientists face when researching documentary film festivals, the second looks at the historical development of this circuit within the wider frame of history of world and national cinemas, and the third reflects on how politics find their way through festival programs and actions. Curatorial, organizational, industrial and political changes occurred in the festival realm addressed in this book help better understand how these affected documentary production, distribution, curation, exhibition and reception up to this day.

Documentary film festivals do more than provide a venue for watching films: they have the potential to foster critical thinking, especially toward mainstream media. The film festivals discussed in this book also help build a sense of community locally, as well as promote solidarity with people involved in struggles for social justice and ecological integrity around the world. Documentaries by independent filmmakers reveal stories ignored by mass media, stories at times tragic but more often than not inspiring. It can be said that documentary film festivals create a public space for citizens to listen together and to become informed on current issues in greater depth than newscast bulletins offer. This book shows how documentary films create a liminal space with transformative potential, a space that challenges assumptions, supports the development of empathy, and often stimulates engagement and action. In viewing documentaries together and engaging in critical reflection and dialogue, citizens can imagine alternative possibilities and consider solutions. Documentary Film Festivals: Transformative Learning, Community Building & Solidarity offers the voices of attendees, sponsors, and organizers who shared their thoughts and experiences of documentary film festivals and the impact on their views and engagement. Activists and organizers of various social movements who are seeking ways to inform and inspire will see evidence in this text that documentary film festivals are a means of drawing diverse audiences, engaging differences and respectfully promoting hope and preferred visions of the future. Documentary Film Festivals: Transformative Learning, Community Building & Solidarity includes concrete examples of creative and courageous struggles that have led to victories often ignored by the media. This book is bound to inspire.

Established in 1955, the Leipzig International Documentary Film Festival became a central arena for staging the cultural politics of the German Democratic Republic, both domestically and in relation to West Germany and the rest of the world. Screened Encounters represents the definitive history of this key event, recounting the political and artistic exchanges it enabled from its founding until German unification, and tracing the outsize influence it exerted on international cultural relations during the Cold War.

"This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the global landscape of documentary film festivals, looking at its contemporary and future challenges. Contributors from across the globe reflect on how documentary has positioned itself within both internationally renowned and more alternative festivals."--Page 4 of cover.

This is an open access book. This edited collection aims to document the effects of Covid-19 on film festivals and to theorize film festivals in the age of social distancing. To some extent, this crisis begs us to consider what happens when festivals can’t happen; while films have found new (temporary) channels of distribution (most often in the forms of digital releases), the festival format appears particularly vulnerable in pandemic times. Imperfect measures, such as the move to a digital format, cannot recapture the communal experience at the very core of festivals. Given the global nature of the pandemic and the diversity of the festival phenomenon, this book features a wide range of case studies and analytical frameworks. With contributors including established scholars and frontline festival workers, the book is conceived as both a theoretical endeavour and a practical exploration of festival organizing in pandemic times.

The fourth volume in the Docalogue series, this book explores the significance of the documentary Honeyland (2019) in relation to documentary ethics, the representation of human and animal relations, environmental studies, genre theory, and documentary distribution. The film, focused on a Turkish-speaking woman in Macedonia who cultivates bees to produce honey through an ancient and environmentally sustainable method, raises important questions about the place of humans and economic activity within the broader ecosystem. The documentary also prompts critical reflection about the relationship between observation and storytelling, how the film festival circuit allows certain films to reach a wide audience, the ethics of ethnographic representation, the relationship between human and insect life, and to what extent film can allow us to experience others’ life-worlds. By combining five distinct critical perspectives on a single documentary, this book acts both as an intensive scholarly treatment of the film and as a guide for how to analyze, theorize, and contextualize a documentary text. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of documentary studies, as well as those studying film and media more broadly.

The Japanese Cinema Book provides a new and comprehensive survey of one of the world's most fascinating and widely admired filmmaking regions. In terms of its historical coverage, broad thematic approach and the significant international range of its authors, it is the largest and most wide-ranging publication of its kind to date. Ranging from renowned directors such as Akira Kurosawa to neglected popular genres such as the film musical and encompassing topics such as ecology, spectatorship, home-movies, colonial history and relations with Hollywood and Europe, The Japanese Cinema Book presents a set of new, and often surprising, perspectives on Japanese film. With its plural range of interdisciplinary perspectives based on the expertise of established and emerging scholars and critics, The Japanese Cinema Book provides a groundbreaking picture of the different ways in which Japanese cinema may be understood as a local, regional, national, transnational and global phenomenon. The book's innovative structure combines general surveys of a particular historical topic or critical approach with various micro-level case studies. It argues there is no single fixed Japanese cinema, but instead a fluid and varied field of Japanese filmmaking cultures that continue to exist in a dynamic relationship with other cinemas, media and regions. The Japanese Cinema Book is divided into seven inter-related sections: · Theories and Approaches · * Institutions and Industry · * Film Style · * Genre · * Times and Spaces of Representation · * Social Contexts · * Flows and Interactions