Working Group 2: Film and Film Festivals

WG2 examines how regional film (re)mediates collective memory, foregrounding selected regional festivals invested in memory remediation and memory work.

Film networks in the post-Yugoslav countries weakened after the collapse of the socialist Yugoslav space, but the rupture was never complete, and they were also extensively (re)activated and expanded after the 2008-economic crisis. This was due to the common realization of film workers around the region that collaboration is a path to quality output, to funding and distribution channels as well as international visibility. Similar collaboration in documentary films is even more pronounced, taking into account the shared (regional) thematic focal points in social and cultural sense, as well as more strenuous financing options for the documentary film.

Old regional festivals that functioned throughout the 1990s, as well as new ones, which have been mushrooming as a part of a global trend, have contributed to this twofold development, providing alternative distribution networks for films with little commercial appeal. In the post-Yugoslav space, they also explicitly engage with cultural memory in terms of narratives, aesthetics, and practices, acting as hubs not only for industry professionals, but also for communities of practice and affect. WG2 examines the dynamics of memory work at multiple film festivals in the post-Yugoslav space, with a specific focus on Slovenia (29 annual film festivals active since 2008) and Croatia (between 39 and 69 annual film festivals active since 2008). 

The objective of Working Group 2 is to offer a classification of the cinematic memory-work strategies developed and used by selected local film festivals, accounting for their transnational and transcultural dimension (that is, program selection, curation, and international and local presentation, and communication), film aesthetics, and reception.