Dynamics of World Cinema

In recognition of her scholarship on issues related to the study of film festivals, Prof. Dina Iordanova has been invited to join the Board of Directors of the Centre for the Moving Image which runs the Edinburgh International Film Festival. In 2011 the EIFF festival will run between 15 and 26 June as a non-competitive event.

The 5th of March is World Book Day and across the UK hundreds of volunteers will be distributing free books to the general public. Prof. Dina Iordanova is one such volunteer, and she will be handing out copies of Erich Maria Remarque's First World War classic, All Quiet on the Western Front. The event will take place from 6pm at the Byre Theatre. All are welcome.

The Times Higher Education 2010 World University Rankings has the University of St Andrews placed at Number 20 in the top 50 Arts and Humanities Universities. In other rankings (Guardian, Independent, Times, THE) St Andrews is consistently placed within the top five UK universities.

In other rankings (Guardian, Independent, Times, THE) St Andrews is consistently placed within the top five UK universities, with Philosophy being one of its most most highly ranked subjects.

Dina Iordanova gave a talk entitled 'Festivals Need Film/ Film Needs Festivals' at the Euro-Festival workshop organised by Istututo Cattaneo and the University of Bologna in Bologna, Italy on November 25, 2010.

This was also an excellent opportunity to visit the DAMS (film studies) department at the University of Bologna - the oldest, largest, best-established and most respected one in the country- and make important

contacts in the city where the venerable Cinema Ritrovato cinephile event takes place.

Ethnic Film Festivals 

Minority film festivals are creating live social and political encounters that bring together a host of imagined communities, according to a new book by researchers at the University of St Andrews and worldwide.

Film Festivals and Imagined Communities, the second volume in the Film Festival Yearbook series, brings together essays about festivals that use international cinema to mediate the creation of transnational 'imagined communities'.

Professor Dina Iordanova of the University of St Andrews, editor and publisher of Film Festival Yearbook 2, said:

"Film Festivals are usually associated with glamorous city locations, where celebrities showcase designer outfits on miles of red carpet. But what about the other film festivals, those organised by minority groups for minority audiences - for example Edinburgh's African film festival , the Migrant Worker Film Festival in South Korea, or the festivals set up by activists to cater to displaced populations in the Sahara? These film festivals may be far from the limelight, yet are of at least equal importance in regard to our understanding of the dynamics in the global circulation of cinema."

Film Festivals and Imagined Communities includes discussion of the cultural policies and funding models linked to these festivals, as well as analysis of programming practices linked to these often highly politicised events.

Case studies focus on diaspora-linked festivals that take place around the world - from Bradford to Havana and that feature cinema from places as diverse as Nepal and Kurdistan, Africa and Latin America.

American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum said:

"The very ambitious aspiration of the Film Festival Yearbook is, quite literally, to define a new area of film study."

Faye Ginsburg, Director of the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University, said:

"Film Festivals and Imagined Communities opens up new horizons both for those who study media and those who create the significant but often overlooked 'media worlds' where films first get launched: film festivals from the 'periphery'."

Authors include Lindiwe Dovey, Ruby Cheung, Michael Guillén, Jérôme Segal, Miriam Ross, Roy Stafford, Yun Mi Hwang, Isabel Santaolalla and Stefan Simanowitz, Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck, Mustafa Gündogdu, and Dina Iordanova.

A book launch event, in which Film Festival Yearbook 2 will be presented, will be held at 1500 hours on Sunday March 7, 2010 at the BFI Southbank Filmstore in London.

To Interested Reviewers of Film Festival Yearbook 2

Thank you for your interest in reviewing Film Festival Yearbook 2: Film Festivals and Imagined Communities (2010). 

Review copies of Film Festival Yearbook 2 have been sent to various internationally renowned journals with global circulation. If you would like to review the book for a journal, please download a list of journals with the link below and contact your preferred journal directly.  

 ffy2reviewers_journals.doc 

Senses of Cinema, the Australian on-line journal, have run Saer Ba's report on the Festivals Workshop in their issue 51. Here is the link to this interesting summary of the event.

Richard Porton has run a great piece, 'The Festival Whirl' at Moving Image Source, which makes extensive references to the Festivals Workshop we held in April 2009 and to the first volume of the Film Festivals Yearbook. He notes that the book manages finally 'to provide an alternative to the usual conformist cheerleading that surrounds film festivals' and that the workshop brought together a group of people who were 'determined to apply some analytical rigor to a subject encrusted with journalistic cliches'. He also has got some nice things to say about the new face of academia, as revealed in the context of our work. Check Richard's piece out at:

http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-festival-whirl-20090908