Where there's smoke: digital storytelling for healing

Columbia University School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab, in collaboration with Columbia’s Department of Narrative Medicine, developed Where There’s Smoke, a story and grief ritual that mixes interactive documentary, immersive theatre and online collaboration to invite healthcare providers and others into resonant conversations about life, loss and memory, and to imagine how stories can be used to create empathetic healing spaces. When Robert Weiler was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer, the complexity of healthcare and ensuing grief for the family, led his son Lance, a storytelling pioneer, to realize that a straightforward story wasn’t enough to explain and explore the experience, so he created Where There’s Smoke. Where There’s Smoke premiered in 2019 at the Tribeca Film Festival where it was hailed as an “absolute can’t miss” (Backstage). However, when COVID-19 submerged the world in loss, uncertainty, and isolation, Lance reimagined the piece as an online experience. He also combined the piece with protocols of Narrative Medicine as provided by faculty, Deborah Starr. The piece traces a heartbreaking journey through end-of-life care and grief, embracing grief as nonlinear and immersive, grief as an escape room with no escape. Participants sift through artwork, videos, and conversations and are provided with immersive moments for individuals, pairs and groups to have opportunities for self-discovery, unexpected intimacy, and ensuing healing. This is a personal yet universally relevant narrative, which gradually reveals itself to be something more…the possibility of immersive storytelling to create space for empathetic healing, grieving, and connecting.

Cultural Diplomacy on International Film Festivals, during the unprecedented year of 2020.

Against the countless cancellations of cultural events around the globe, the dynamics of the film festival circuit and its representations took on new courses and different perspectives. About these symbolic power relations, the article dives into a brief data record, on the performance and possible adaptations upon the organization of film festivals, during the year 2020, and throughout the global pandemic, that exponentiated the digitization of some structuring processes on international cinematographic circulation. Ultimately, it adds notions of cultural diplomacy to international film festivals. In order to transpose theoretical concepts to contemporary practice and verify, in this way, the influences and consequences of virtualization to the subjectivities and significance of diplomacy and otherness upon interconnected identities in the current global community.

Lavender Images and Poetic Landscapes: My Thirty Years in the Queer Film Ecosystem

This chapter by LGBT filmmaker and film historian Jenni Olson is a firsthand account of her thirty-plus years of work across the ecosystem of queer cinema. It covers her curatorial work in the late 1980s and early 1990s (she was codirector of the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival); her extraordinary efforts as an LGBT film collector and archivist over the decades (her collection was acquired by the Harvard Film Archive in 2020); her pioneering work in online queer-film exhibition, as cofounder of PlanetOut.com; her decade as director of marketing for the LGBT film distributor, Wolfe Video; and her work as a maker of digressive and contemplative 16mm essay films, such as The Royal Road (2015) and The Joy of Life (2005), which speak from a butch lesbian perspective and reflect on a wide array of preoccupations.

Divan film festival or the story of a big small festival of cinematographic and culinary art in the Balkans

In 2010 a small festival on Balkan cuisine and cinema, leaving aside the competition and prizes, endeavored to promote a unifying perspective on the cinema of 10 nations: Balkan film studies. It is the merit of the great writer and recently chef Mircea Dinescu, of the amazing settlement on the banks of the Danube, where the borders of Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia meet, of some serious scholars, as well as of the great value of the Balkan films of the last decades that imposed the expression “Balkan film”. Paradoxically, while ethnic conflicts have provoked terrible experiences for the inhabitants of the Balkans and erected new borders, the filmmakers seem to have benefited from the authentic drama and have learned to better address the surrounding nations as well.

Utopian Montage: exploring transnational folk cinemas online during the Covid-19 pandemic as part of the 2020 Folk Film Gathering film festival

This essay explores some of the simultaneous limitations and affordances the Covid-19 pandemic has created for emergent perspectives upon a transnational folk cinema. Merging aspects of more traditional scholarly enquiry with the research-by-practice embodied within Scotland's Folk Film Gathering film festival, we position two case studies - of Nadir Bouhmouch's Amussu (2020) and the Amber Collective's Like Father (2001) respectively - within some of the broader question underlying attempts to bring the conviviality of community-focussed filmmaking and cinema-going online during the pandemic.