On November 4-6, 2024, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice organized an international symposium titled “Film Festivals: Borders, Identities, Solidarities”. The two-day event brought together an interdisciplinary range of scholars to explore how the issues of borders, identities and solidarities have been tackled by and through film festivals.

Dunja Jelenković, Marie S. Curie postdoctoral fellow at Ca’ Foscari and the symposium organizer, set out to organize the multifaceted impact of film festivals as ‘places of memory’ that provide an institutional framework for the cultural memories they preserve and produce through their programmes. The symposium allowed the participants to interrogate how the festivals’ influence becomes long-term and wide encompassing, moving far beyond from their actual time and place. 

The presentations touched upon issues ranging from how diverse festival actors (journalists, critics, industry representatives, politicians, etc.) allow the narratives produced in the framework of film festivals to reach diverse categories of society, not limited to those present at the screening; and to what effect the festivals’ sociocultural impact is harnessed in times of political  and military conflicts and social turbulences, when not only various kinds of liberties, but also people’s lives, can be threatened.

The theme of the symposium resonated strongly with MEMPOP, as it foregrounded the interactive, multimodal and multimedial, and evental aspects of modern popular culture. MEMPOP members Natalija Majsova, Boris Ružić, and Jasmina Šepetavc thus organized a special panel in the framework of the event, zooming in on the mnemonic strategies of film festivals in the post-Yugoslav space, highlighting three complementary topics:

–  the role of regional queer film festivals in complicating simplified histories and circulating and reframing regional queer memories (Šepetavc);

– the impact of the growing number of film festivals in the region that foreground collective memory and contribute to the consolidation of “memory films” as a separate formal, aesthetic, and ethical category (Majsova), and

– the position of small, locally oriented documentary film festivals as a discourse and a structure in reworking meanings surrounding screened films and their reception (Ružić).

The inspiring event allowed the MEMPOP team to situate their research in the context of discussions on solidarity and activist film festival studies.