Baftss 2023 Full Programme

11th Annual Conference
Sustainable Futures: Ethics,

Responsibility and Care in Film,
Television, Screen Studies and
Practices
University of Lincoln, 3 – 5 April 2023
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The conference organisers would like to thank Palgrave Macmillan for their generous
sponsorship. Their support has allowed us to extend access to the conference via reduced
concessionary rates.
Publishers with Stands:

Edinburgh University Press
Intellect
Liverpool University Press
Manchester University Press
Palgrave Macmillan
Peter Lang
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Conference Overview
Monday 3 April 2023

9:45 – 10:30 Registration / Refreshments
10:30 – 10:45 Welcome
10:45 – 11:45 PGR Workshop
12:00 – 13:30 Parallel Panels: 1.1 – 1.6
13:30 – 14:30 Lunch
14:30 – 16:00 Parallel Panels: 2.1 – 2.6
16:15 – 17:45 Parallel Panels: 3.1 – 3.6
18:00 Brian Winston Memorial Drinks
Tuesday 4 April 2023

10:00 – 11:30 Parallel Panels: 4.1 – 4.5
11:45 – 13:15 Parallel Panels: 5.1 – 5.5
13:15 – 14:15 Lunch
14:15 – 15:45 Parallel Panels: 6.1 – 6.5
16:00 – 17:30 Parallel Panels: 7.1 – 7.6
17:40 – 19:00 BAFTSS AGM, Publications and Practice Research Awards
20:30 Dinner
Wednesday 5 April 2023
10:00 – 11:30 Parallel Panels 8.1 – 8.5
11:45 – 13:15 Parallel Panels 9.1 – 9.6
13:15 – 14:15 Lunch
14:15 – 15:45 Parallel Panels 10.1 – 10.5
15:45 – 16:00 Closing Remarks
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Panels
Session 1 Monday 3 April 12:00 – 13:30
1.1 Special Interest Group: Adaptation

CHAIR: TBC
Louise Coopey
Spinoffs and Prequels: The Sustainability of the Game of Thrones (2011-2019) Storyworld
Andrew Watts
Sustainability, Survival, and (Mis)Remembering the Canon: Adapting Mark Twain’s
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Christina Wilkins
Truth, Self-hood, and Adaptation in Westworld
1.2 Special Interest Group: British Cinema and Television

CHAIR: TBC
Simon Harvey and Kingsley Marshall
Long Way Back: Developing working principles for crewing feature film production with
higher education students.
1.3 Documentary
CHAIR: Katerina Loukopoulou
Lizzie Thynne
A feminist revisioning of British Documentary history
George Larke-Walsh and Elayne Chaplin
The Ethics of True Crime Adaptation: The Staircase
Ipsita Sahu
From "Voice of God" to "Voice of Nation": Melville Demellow and the television
series Perspective and Now
Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz
The Uses of Documentary and Based-on-a-True-Story Format
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1.4 Archives
CHAIR: Llewella Chapman
Carolyn Birdsall and Joanne Garde-Hansen
A Dutchman and an Englishman walk into Flood History: New Readings of Broadcast
Archives for Transnational Futures
Liz Watkins
Colourisation, Ethics and the Archive: attending to the dead.
Nikolaus Perneczky
World Film Heritage: Decolonising Care and Sustainability in Global Audiovisual Archiving
Joanne Knowles
‘Essential stuff’: TV reviews in Just Seventeen and the framing of TV for teenage girls
1.5 Film Practice Pedagogy
CHAIR: TBC
Rob Hardcastle and Andrew Vallance
Questions of imagination and process: The potential of film practice pedagogy to challenge
existing modes of production in the context of the climate emergency
Misha Zakharov
Detoxifying the archive: remakes, revisions, reenactments
Phil Mathews
Decolonising curriculums and enabling transnational approaches across postgraduate

media production courses 
1.6 Practice Awards Nominees Screening 1
2.1 Philosophy, Memory, Temporality
CHAIR: TBC
Louis Bayman
Memories of the future: Spencer (2021), history and multiple temporality
Vangelis Makriyannakis
The ethics of non self being in Alexandr Askoldov’s Commissar (1967)
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Sophia Kanaouti
Arendt’s “political space”: Killing Eve, real politics, and the feminist politics of the woman
psychopath
2.2 Sexualities
CHAIR: Emma Morton
Rachel Milne
“Hardship Within the Context of Joy”: Rafiki’s Queer Resistance
Polina Zelmanova
Mediating representations of Sex and Consent on Screen after #MeToo
Yuan Li
Man in Love, Woman in Activism: Gender, Politics, and Linguistic Relativity in New Taiwanese
Melodrama
2.3 Stars, Costume, Makeup
CHAIR: Llewella Chapman
Abigail Whittall
Examining Guillermo Del Toro’s Monsters: Labour, Visibility and the Practical Effects Makeup
Actor
Ellen Wright
Marilyn Monroe™: The problematic promotional politics of sex aids, biopics and borrowed
dresses.
Richard Farmer
‘Bridal outfits from the heart of filmland’: Clothes rationing, wartime film production and
Gainsborough Pictures’ Studio Hire Service  
2.4 Decolonising and Positionality
CHAIR: TBC
Astrid Korporaal
Material Beings: Decolonial Roleplay in the work of Ana María Millán and Erika Tan
Finn Daniels-Yeomans
Researcher Positionality and the Quiet Non-Certitude of Rosine Mbakam
Viviane Saglier
6
The “Circulatory Matrix” of Human Rights: Arab Film Festivals as Communication
Infrastructure
2.5 Fossil Aesthetics
CHAIR: TBC
Jaime Vindel
The dam as cinematographic Atlante: hegemony, hydroelectricity and ecological sensitivity

in the Italian film production of the economic miracle
Miguel Errazu
Mining Sites and Contact Cinemas: reanimating the Miner’s Film Workshop of Telamayu
(Bolivia, 1983)
Alberto Berzosa
Traces of Portuguese ecologism around the carnations
2.6 Queer Authorship
CHAIR: Billy Errington
Megan Wilson
"I know about an all-woman world": Embodying equity and intimacy in Portrait of a Lady on
Fire's lesbian imaginary
Becky Ellis
A League of One’s Own: Abbi Jacobson the new queer pioneer
3.1 Special Interest Group: Filmmaking Education

CHAIR: Jolene Mairs Dyer
James Staunton-Price
Beyond ‘Skills for a Sustainable Industry’: Socio-ecological experiments in nonfiction

filmmaking pedagogy
Richard Langley
Albert, Employability and the Elephant in the Room
Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon
Filmmaking for Change
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3.2 Special Interest Group: Science Fiction
CHAIR: TBC
Mark Bould
Marjorie Prime: labour and technology, memory and loss in the Anthropocene
Amy C. Chambers
The interface at the end of the world: posthuman care, mental health and memory in Aniara
(2018)
Alexander Sergeant
Caring for the World: The Virtue of Superman
3.3 Runaway Production & Heritage
CHAIR: TBC
Chrishandra Sebastiampillai
Runaway film production and film-induced tourism: sustainability of heritage houses as film
sets in Malaysia
Rosemary Alexander-Jones
Age versus Beauty: Conservation Considerations for Filming in Heritage Properties
Olivia Booker
Margaret Tait’s Film Poems as a Model for Ecological Filmmaking Practice
Júlia Havas and Nick Jones
Dystopian Futures on Hungarian Soundstages: Technology and Support Work in Runaway

Productions
3.4 Videogames paratexts: pasts and futures
CHAIR: TBC
Esther Wright
The uses of “History” in Digital Game Paratexts
Nick Webber
The paratextual past – relating histories of game experience to game texts
Iain Donald
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Account, Accuracy, and Authenticity: A Framework for Analysing Historical Narrative in
Games
Ed Vollans
Accidental archives and paratextuality
3.5 Roundtable: Ethics and Praxis – Sustainable Futures
CHAIR: TBC
Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz, Rebecca Harrison, Phil Mathews, Christa VanRaalte, Rowan Aust,
Agnieszka Piotrowska, Neil Percival
3.6 Screening
Slow Fashion (2022, Eme Eidson) with producer Melissa Edison
Session 4 Tuesday 4 April 10:00 – 11:30
4.1 Animals
CHAIR: Gábor Gergely
Sophie Quin
Of elk and wolves: Extinction and evocations of species from the Irish animated bestiary
Lucas Rinzema
Care and Cow
Özlem Güçlü
Devouring Gaze of Bluefish: Subordination of Animal Life in The Sustainability Discourse
4.2 Surveillance
CHAIR: TBC
Jonathan Murray
The Spy Writer Who came in from the Cold: post 1989 screen adaptations of John le Carré
Joseph Bitney
Surveillance Cinema, The Future, and The Interior
Yushi Hou
The environment in Contemporary Chinese Surveillance Cinema: The “naked city” and
Ethics
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4.3 A Field of Green?
CHAIR: TBC
Rebecca Harrison and Syuhaida Mohamed Yunus
Metals, Mouldings, and Trash Compactors: Artoo Detoo and the Environmental Impact of
Star Wars
Malcolm Cook
Full Circle: Useful Animation, Petroleum Extraction, and Research-Led Teaching
Caitriona Noonan and Inge Sørensen
European Screen Agencies and Sustainability: Interventions for Greening the Screen
4.4 Videogames and XR
CHAIR: TBC
Bjarke Liboriussen
The unintended procedural argument for transactional climate change leadership in

Civilization VI: Gathering Storm
Maggie Xiaoge Li
Rebuilding Lost Memory in Digital Games
Maruša Levstek
Green Planet: XR to Change Minds About Our Planet
4.5 American Cinema
CHAIR: TBC
Tim Lindemann
‘History Isn’t Here Yet‘ – Landscape, Entanglement, and the Nation in First Cow and Meek’s
Cutoff
Michelle Devereaux
The Woman Who Left: Nomadland, Moral Perfectionism, and the ‘Unknown Woman’ of
Neoliberalism
Alan Watt
Morality and hypermorality in film storytelling: Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992)
Jady Jiang
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Retro-Technology, Hauntology, and the Uncanny Sustainability in The Skeleton Key
4.6 Early Career Researcher Roundtable: Research and Teaching Pathways
CHAIR: Eve Benhamou
TBC
5.1 Special Interest Group: Performance and Stardom

CHAIR: TBC
Christopher Holliday
“A poor attempt to replicate my work”: The remixed soundcapes of digital de-aging
Jennifer O’Meara
From Soft Focus to AR filters: the Evolving, Technologically-Designed Face of Female

Stardom
Szilvia Ruszev
New identities of virtual stardom: How do virtual influencers change or maintain social
stereotypes?
Sarah Thomas
Trust, authenticity and agency in the celebrity digital double
5.2 Special Interest Group: Amateur Film
CHAIR: Annamaria Motrescu-Mayers
Alyssa Grossman
Transcending Domestic Ethnography: Haptic Remediations of a Family Archive
Zoë Viney Burgess
Towards the next century of amateur film archives: writing ourselves into history
Karianne Fiorini and Gianmarco Torri
A (possible) handbook for the creative re-use of home movies
5.4 Special Interest Group: French and Francophone Cinemas
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CHAIR: TBC
Martin Hall
Form Meets Message: Documentary Style and Social Justice in Agnes Varda’s Feature Work
Tamsin Graves
Prioritising the marginalised voice: Sustainable storytelling in the abandoned spaces of

Gatlif’s Indignados (2012)
Laura McMahon
Care, solidarity and entanglement in Khady Sylla’s Une fenêtre ouverte (2005)
5.4 Ecological Filmmaking and Art Film
CHAIR: TBC
Esther Johnson
DUST & METAL: a cinematic reflection on Vietnam’s love affair with motorbikes
Silvia Angeli
An Ode to Impermanence: Alice Rohrwacher’s Quattro strade (Four Roads, 2020)
Tina Kandiashvili
“Something Terrible about Reality”: Environment and Plato’s Epistemology in Antonioni’s

Red Desert (1964)
5.5 Decolonising Methods: Theory and Philosophy
CHAIR: TBC
May Adadol Ingawanij
Animistic Apparatus as a Curatorial Method
Victor Fan
The Way It Is: Buddhist Ecological Thinking on Power and Knowledge
Kiki Tianqi Yu
Cinema as the Dao: A Daoist approach to moving images as Decolonising Knowledge

Production
5.6 Special Interest Group: Colour
CHAIR: TBC
Eleanor Halsall
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Experimenting in colour: The film studio as laboratory in Germany
Sarah Street
Encounters with Colour at Denham Studios
Carla Mereu Keating
Blinding lights: Ferraniacolor and the hazards of working with novel film technologies
6.1 Transforming Middlemarch

CHAIR: TBC
Justin Smith
Adding value to BBC IP – A sustainable approach to PSB archives and fair use exceptions to
copyright law: the case of Andrew Davies’ 1994 BBC adaptation of Middlemarch
Anna Blackwell and Lucinda Hobbs
(Ir)/responsible adaptation: editing, designing and building a genetic edition for the
Transforming Middlemarch project
Natalie Hayton
Democratising Adaptations and Discovering the Archive: confronting issues of ethics,

representation, custodianship and copyright in the creation of a Genetic Edition of Andrew
Davies’ 1994 BBC adaptation of George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch
6.2 Screening Chinese eco-aesthetics
CHAIR: TBC
Shiqin Zhang
(Un)gendering the Dump: Waste, Body, and Affect in Plastic China and When the Bough
Breaks
Xi Liu
Slow living: re-editing space and time in short videos
Poppy Qian Zhai
What is a sustainable city? To brand Copenhagen as an attractive destination in China
6.3 Working Conditions and Equalities
CHAIR: Bella Honess Roe
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Dyna Herlina Suwarto
Creative Hustle as Coping Practice of Precarity among Local Filmmakers
Christa van Raalte, Rowan Aust and Richard Wallis
Where have all the PMs gone? The importance of sustainable working environments in
addressing persistent skills gaps in UK TV
Rayna Lountzis
Mental Health On/Off Set: Fostering inclusive working practices in the Film and TV Industry
- a British Academy Innovation Fellowship analysis
Mrunal Chavda
Mind the Himalayan Gap: does the brutal gender imbalance in the Gujarati Cinema reflect
Gujarati society?
6.4 Histories of Crisis/Failure
CHAIR: TBC
James Chapman
The Patient Who Refused to Die: The economic and fiscal sustainability of the British film
production industry
Hannah Andrews
(Un)Sustainable Satire: Spitting Image in the eras of Thatcher and Johnson
Harry Warwick
Cathedral of Power: Battersea Power Station in Dystopian Visual Culture
Hannah Spaulding
Remembering QUBE: Digital Afterlives, Cable, and Sustaining “Failed” Technologies
6.5 Environment and Indigenous Communities
CHAIR: Billy Errington
Sofie Roberts
Wales and the Green Screen: Sustainability and Environment in Welsh Filmmaking
Adelaide McGinity-Peebles
Precarious Nature and Identity in the Indigenous Cinema of the Sakha Republic (Russian
Federation)
Anna Sowa
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“The worst thing you can do to the environment is to make a film about it” … but it does
not have to be...
Rachel Gough
A Force of Nature: Film Production as Environmental Threat on Skellig Michael
7.1 Sustainable Production

CHAIR: Christa VanRaalte
Tom Livingstone
Rigged for Scalability: Game Engines and Sustainable Futures
Muriel Tinel-Temple
Digital Landscapes: movements and metamorpheses in the work of Jacques Perconte
Jack Shelbourn
New Naturalism and Writing a New Film Production Manifesto
7.2 Special Interest Group: Film Philosophy
CHAIR: Dominic Lash
Lucy Bolton
The Difficulty of Thinking Perpetually on Oneself: Iris Murdoch’s Existentialism on show in

French Exit
Kierran Horner
Existential Conflict versus an Ethical Self: Intersubjective Relations and Mortality in Beauvoir,
Sartre and Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7
Xi Lu
The War Film and Existentialism: All Quiet on the Western Front
David Sorfa
The Lad Meets the Existentialists: Tony Hancock, The Rebel and Rendezvous in July
7.3 Special Interest Group: Screening Sex
CHAIR: Darren Kerr
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Simon Hobbs and Megan Hoffman
Confronting a Genre: The Ethical Implications of Post #MeToo True Crime
Tia Price
True Crime Dark Fandom: The Dominatrix and The Dildo
Tanya Horeck
True Crime TikTok: On Ethics and Algorithms
7.4 Global Politics & Infrastructures
CHAIR: Maryam Ghorbankarimi
Katerina Loukopoulou
The United Nations’ Cinematic Worldmaking of a Sustainable future: the Case of Power
Among Men (1959)
Cristina Formenti
Towards the Eco-documentary of the Future: Carbon: The Unauthorised Biography (2021)
and the Route to Eco-sustainable Documentary Filmmaking
María A. Vélez-Serna
Anti-infrastructural media: Reuse and detournement of sponsored film in environmental

conflicts
Nikki J.Y. Lee
An Ecocritical Approach to Discourses on the Korean Film Industry: A Preliminary

Exploration of the Environmental Turn
7.5 British Television
CHAIR: TBC
Rowan Aust, Helen Kennedy, Jack Newsinger and Natalie Wreyford
Motherhood, television work and the crisis in care
Faye Woods
Death of a matriarch: EastEnders soap opera space and aesthetics
Alexander Sergeant and Evan Pugh
The Ethics of Reality Television: Understanding UK Production Cultures
7.6 Roundtable: Sustainability of the Discipline
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Mary Harrod, Mattias Frey, Karen Lury and Sarah Atkinson
Session 8 Wednesday 5 April 10:00 – 11:30
8.1 Film Pedagogy

CHAIR: Christa VanRaalte
Verena von Eicken
Levelling the playing field – Enabling learning on gender and politics for film students
Catriona McAvoy
Confronting “Institutional Whiteness” in Research and Practice: Ethics, Responsibility and
Solidarity
Tasos Giapoutzis
Student Film Festival: A sustainable project
8.2 Transnational Distribution

CHAIR: TBC
Maryam Ghorbankarimi
Sustainable Strategies: Showcasing Middle Eastern content to world audiences
Matthew Hilborn
'Controversies of the Streaming Age – Spain and the Torrente Saga (dir. Santiago Segura,
1998, 2001, 2005, 2011, 2014)'
8.3 Film and Ethics

CHAIR: TBC
Guy Westwell
Sustainable Futures From Past Lives: Ghandi (1982), Rosa Luxemburg (1986), A Hidden
Life (2013) and the Peace Biopic
Libby Saxton
‘The Anguish of the Future’: Iconicity, Sustainability and Mushroom Clouds
Kiki Tianqi Yu
Cultivating a Sense of Oneness Through Cinema and Sustainable Filmmaking Through
Daoism
Anat Pick
Éric Rohmer’s Vegetal Ethics
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Janet Harbord
Sustainability-Neurodiversity-Cinema
8.4 Precarity and Gladiatorial Archetypes of Violence

CHAIR: Jonathan Murray
Karen A. Ritzenhoff
Exploitation and Violence: Precarious Labor in Squid Game
Francesco Sticchi
Gladiatorial Games and the Exploitation of the General Intellect: On the Success of Squid
Game (2021)
Lindsay Steenberg
Violence, Precarity, and the Warriors of Contemporary Television
8.5 Sustainability in Italian Film

CHAIR: TBC
Marco Cucco and Federica d’Urso
Defining Models of Public Strategy to Implement Eco-sustainable Behaviors in Audiovisual
Production: The Italian Case Study
Paolo Carelli and Anna Sfardini
Italian Unscripted TV Goes Sustainable: Issues and Practices of Green Representation in
Contemporary Television
8.6 Roundtable: Cultures of Care: Changing Media Practice

Susan Berridge, Shweta Ghosh, Mette Hjort, Tanya Horeck and Leshu Torchin
9.1 Special Interest Group: Screen Industries

CHAIR: Andrew Spicer
Jane Dawson
Beyond Carbon Reduction: Ethics, crew and natural history filmmaking futures
Charlotte Crofts
“Beautiful Possibility”: Green Filmmaking Pedagogy, Climate Content and Radical Optimism
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9.2 Special Interest Group: Archives and Methods
CHAIR: TBC
Matt Melia
Zappa (2020) and the Zappa ‘Vault’ – Film as Archive
Llewella Chapman
The early Tomb Raider franchise: Videogames, preservation, ethics and the archive
James Fenwick
Sustaining a load of rubbish or: How I learned to stop worrying and recycle archival
ephemera in the Stanley Kubrick Archive
9.3 Masculinities
CHAIR: Polina Zelmanova
Dan Martin
‘It’s about…just finding a way to survive’: Northern Masculinity, Seriality, and (Re)
Imaginations of Working-Class Futures in Sky’s Brassic (2019 - )
Victoria Pistivsek
Caring White Men?: American Masculinity, Liberal Resistance, and Funny Sustainable
Failures in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema
Mustafa Kocabinar
Challenging Stereotypes: The Representation of Henry V in David Michôd’s The King (2019)
9.4 Children, Families, Place
CHAIR: Eve Benhamou
Jane Batkin
A Child in the Archives: Metaphor, Sustainability and the Question of Truth/Fiction within
Live Action and Animated Screened Childhoods
Andrés Buesa
Moving to Stay Still: The Child, Mobility and Environmental Change
Diane Charlesworth
Unpacking discourses of “care” and “sustainability” in the UK children’s television ecology

and television policy. A case study of Channel 5’s pre-school brand Milkshake’s series: The
World According to Grandpa (2020 - present) and Go Green with the Grimwades (2020 –
present).
Yue Su
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The (Un-)Sustainability of Food and Kinship in the Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu
9.5 Mind and Representation
CHAIR: Jolene Mairs Dyer
MaoHui Deng
How Useful are Dementia-Friendly Screenings?
Dominic Lash
Privacy, consent, and expression in Ildikó Enyedi's On Body and Soul (Testről és lélekről,
2017)
Hande Çayır
‘You can see the cracks underneath the wallpaper’*: The ethical use of film within institutions
and the possibility of (mis)representing people diagnosed with ‘mental illness’
10.1 Special Interest Group: Animation

CHAIR: Sam Summers
Carla MacKinnon
Exchange of capital in short animated documentary production
Dario Lolli
Capturing Water: Shinkai Makoto’s Weathering with You and the digital aesthetics of
‘atmospheric’ animation
Bella Honess Roe
Flee (2021), animated documentary and the ethics of empathy
10.2 Special Interest Group: Essay Film
CHAIR: TBC
Jill Daniels
If Not Now: Where There is Power There is Resistance
Ming-Yu Lee
20
Essay Film-making in the Age of Anxiety: Letter-Film as a Way of Resistance and Regaining
Utopia
Stuart Moore and Kayla Parker
Our Camera is Not a Projector: Co-creation as a Strategy of Resistance
10.3 Video Essays
CHAIR: Malcolm Cook
Richard Langley, Robert Munro, Muriel Tinel-Temple, Dominic Topp and Ted Wilkes
10.4 Screening the Crisis
CHAIR: TBC
Kayla Meyers
Infinite Possibilities: Imagining a Future through the Multiverse
Virginia Luzón-Aguado
Not Playing Nero’s Fiddle: Finding Hope in Recent Ecocritical Films
Juan A. Tarancón
Break On Through to the Other Side: Roberto Minervini and the Challenge of Hope
Gregory Frame
Fight the Future?: The Purge franchise as warning
10.5 Special Interest Group: Amateur Film Screening
10.6 Screening
DUST AND METAL (Esther Johnson)
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Abstracts and Biographies
Rosemary Alexander-Jones, Age versus Beauty: Conservation Considerations

for Filming in Heritage Properties
The attraction of filming in heritage properties to borrow a historic space to enrich a
diegesis has been a staple of historic and heritage filmmaking since the 1920s with Mary
Pickford’s Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (1924, Marshall Neilan). Filming often provides
substantial fees which can be much needed for the longevity of a site and brings its imagery
to a wider audience. Unfortunately, the aspect that attracts filmmakers to showcase heritage
properties is their age, which often means fragility. There have been many articles about the
conservation issues caused by filming at heritage properties throughout the world and this
paper continues the work in this field by drawing on new research from the last two years.
Filming in heritage properties is increasing, which means more possible conservation
issues. These historic spaces, although versatile, are irreplaceable, meaning that the film
industry has a responsibility of safe practice in these spaces, especially if they want to
continue using them. This paper draws from twenty interviews with managers and owners
in the heritage sector in England and Wales and considers conservation procedures before
and during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing from managers at the National Trust, English
Heritage and owners at privately owned sites, this paper is a fresh examination of how sites
and filmmakers have adapted to filming in historic spaces. This paper considers whether
the fees and increased recognition from filming justifies the current system and what the
future may be for this relationship.
Rosemary Alexander-Jones is a teaching fellow at Warwick University where she convenes
and co-ordinates the Inquiry Research Skills modules for the International Foundation
Programme. Her research focusses on filming at heritage sites, and she is about to take her
viva at the University of York for her thesis ‘The Impact of Filming on Heritage Locations in
England’. She is also an accomplished filmmaker and her short films have been showcased
at the 360° Film Festival and the Jane Austen Film Festival. Her previous video-essay
‘Chatsworth: The Permanent Pemberley’ can be found on the Association of Adaptation
Studies’ YouTube channel.
Hannah Andrews, (Un)Sustainable Satire: Spitting Image in the eras of

Thatcher and Johnson
Spitting Image (1984-96) qualifies as a British television institution. It translated the
grotesque 3D caricatures of Peter Fluck and Roger Law into satirical television puppetry,
presenting a weekly lampoon of the powerful and famous of the 1980s and 1990s. It was
produced in a period of intense change for the UK TV industry, where the old duopoly of
power and control by the BBC and ITV franchises was challenged by start-up independent
companies making television in new ways. Spitting Image Ltd was one such company,
working in partnership with ITV company Central to make the series a flagship programme
for the Midlands franchisee in the 1980s. The programme’s financial, environmental, and,
from the perspective of those who made it, emotional, costs were enormous. Yet it sustained
18 series, several specials, international franchises and a significant amount of programme
merchandise, expanding the show from 30 minutes on a Sunday night to a significant brand.
The 2020 reboot of Spitting Image attempted to capitalise on this brand recognition – and
nostalgia for a popular TV comedy – as part of the launch of Britbox, an SVOD for British
content spearheaded by ITV. It acted as flagship content for the SVOD with the aim of
driving up subscriptions to the service. The political context seemed right for a satirical
22
series, with international figures such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Boris Johnson
good subjects for caricature. Nevertheless, Spitting Image was cancelled after just two
series. It was, as it turned out, unsustainable in the industrial context of the 2020s.
This paper will compare the industrial positioning, production and broadcast/distribution
of these two series. It will use data from interviews with production personnel, archival
research and content analysis to explore how the series lasted as long as it did in the 20th
Century, yet foundered in the 21st. It will examine the distinctions in these political and
industrial contexts to attempt to figure out what constitutes sustainable, and unsustainable,
TV satire.
Hannah Andrews is Associate Professor of Film and Media at the University of Lincoln. Her
research focuses primarily on British cinema and television aesthetics and industries, and
intermedial relationships between television and other cultural forms. She is the author of
Television and British Cinema (2014) and Biographical Television Drama (2021), and her
work has been published in journals such as Screen, Critical Studies in Television and
Adaptation. This paper is being presented as part of the British Academy/Leverhulme
project Televisual Caricature.
Silvia Angeli, An Ode to Impermanence: Alice Rohrwacher’s Quattro strade

(Four Roads, 2020)
This talk focuses on Alice Rohrwacher’s Quattro strade (Four Roads, 2020), an eight-minute
short shot on expired film stock during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic and set in
the director’s home in the Umbrian countryside. The short could not be further away from
the sensationalistic tones which dominated the news in the months preceding its release:
against the proliferation of shocking and dramatic images, Rohrwacher’s cine-eye offers a
recording of unglamourous, mundane moments. By directing our gaze to linger on small
details, she proposes a different hierarchy of visibility, one that prioritises the inconspicuous
and unobtrusive. As such, Quattro Strade is an ode to the beauty of impermanence. Expired
stock is already partially corrupted and deteriorated: it is rotting. There is a clear critique,
then, firmly embedded in the (deceptively) soft tones of the short of the goal-obsessed
attitude typical of contemporary society. If the pandemic has indeed unequivocally
uncovered the inherent fragilities of our current systems and the limits of a neoliberalism-
driven focus on hyperproductivity, Rohrwacher’s short is similarly blunt in its message. It
issues a clear invitation to acknowledge – particularly in a culture that has become
increasingly obsessed with performance (but also data and metrics, quantification, impact
and legacy-making) – that not everything is meant to (or for that matter should) last and that
acts of creativity are not necessarily designed to survive the immediate sense of joy and
fulfilment they produce.
Silvia Angeli is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Manchester. Her research
focuses on film-philosophy, the portrayal of grief and mourning in film, and coming-of-age
narratives. She is especially interested in how adolescents relate to (and resist) institutional
power. She has published peer-reviewed articles on the work of European and North
American filmmakers, including Kenneth Lonergan, Sarah Polley, Marco Bellocchio, and
Denis Côté, and is currently working on a monograph on Alice Rohrwacher. She has served
as creative consultant on Terrence Malick's forthcoming The Way of the Wind.
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Rowan Aust, Helen Kennedy, Jack Newsinger and Natalie Wreyford,
Motherhood, television work and the crisis in care
The COVID pandemic forced an acceleration of the adoption of certain kinds of flexible
working (home-working and flexible hours in particular) but been combined with enormous
challenges that fall disproportionately on women (childcare and increased share of
domestic labour). How television and other creative industries recover in the post-crisis
period thus carries both major opportunity and major risk for its impacts on gendered
outcomes within television work: on the one hand, the opportunity to institutionalise family-
friendly modes of work that reduce gendered inequalities (Hupkau and Petrongolo 2021);
and on the other, risk that existing patterns of inequality based upon the unequal
distribution of unpaid socially reproductive labour will be further entrenched.
This paper is based upon a survey of mothers working in television carried out in March
2021 and follow-up interviews. Findings show the disproportionate impact of the pandemic
on the ability of mothers to work, and the negative impact on mental health and well-being.
Furthermore, the paper demonstrates the additional burden of women’s caring
responsibilities and intersection with demographic, spatial and structural inequalities, and
in doing so raises further questions about how these pressures might be ameliorated in the
post-Covid workplace. We argue that the relative (in)compatibility of television labour with
unpaid, socially reproductive labour is an expression of both the erosion of the ‘social
contract’ and the gendered dimensions of unequal labour relations in the creative
industries. The result is a silencing of the voice of mothers within UK TV.
Rowan Aust is Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield and Co-Director of Share
My Telly Job.
Helen Kennedy is Professor of Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of
Nottingham.
Jack Newsinger is Associate Professor in Cultural Industries at the University of
Nottingham.
Natalie Wreyford is Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College
London.
Jane Batkin, A Child in the Archives: Metaphor, Sustainability and the Question
of Truth/Fiction within Live Action and Animated Screened Childhoods
Childhood through time has been constantly theorized, dissected, contested and
preserved. Childhood addresses the past, present and future; children are “living messages
we send to a time we will not see” (Postman, 1994). The space childhood occupies is
enthralling because of its ambiguity and its otherness; despite this world being inaccessible
to adults, it has nonetheless been captured and preserved on screen. This reveals
something of the status of childhood (as a powerful metaphor of nostalgia/futurism, for
example) and the “emotional charge” of the child’s image (Holland, 2004). Film archives
enable the child to be preserved as part of cinema and tv heritage, performing itself within
a loop that speaks to the past and future. Helena Hörnfeldt, however, argues that in the
archives “children’s voices are partially silent and invisible” (2020), as mere projections
created by adults, and present what adults perceive to be childhood. In that case, is the
archive child actually a false child?
This paper will explore questions of preservation and sustainability of live action and
animated childhoods in the archives and will focus on the secret space of childhood and its
capture on screen. To what extent can film archives offer recollections of childhood that are
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tangible, sustainable, valuable and ‘real’ and how and why is childhood imprinted within
these memory collections?
Jane Batkin is an Associate Professor and animation tutor at the University of Lincoln,
specialising in animated childhoods, worlds and identities. Her monograph Identity in
Animation was published in 2017 and her chapters feature in edited collections including
Toy Story: How Pixar reinvented the Animated Feature (2018), Aardman Animation: Beyond
Stop Motion (2020), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives in Production,
Reception and Legacy (2021), Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio Laika’s Stop Motion
Witchcraft (2021), and the forthcoming book Animated Mischief – Essays on Subversiveness
in Cartoons since 1987. She is currently working on a monograph on animated childhood.
Louis Bayman, Memories of the future: Spencer (2021), history and multiple
temporality
This proposal elaborates an aesthetic register that has become so common as to be
ubiquitous: that of ‘memories of the future’. A memory of the future is a present from which
any sense of futurity is accessible only by recourse to ideas of a past. In order to move
forward, there must be a move backwards. The ubiquity of this register may have many
causes, including the temporalities of finance capital and the “End" of History, the
Anthropocene and the endless “post-“s that describe modern thought. Through discussion
of Spencer (2021) I seek to examine the aesthetic nature of this relationship of the present
to the future.
Taking place between Christmas Eve dinner and Boxing Day lunch, Spencer presents the
antagonism between the Royal Family and the Princess of Wales as a dramatic conflict of
discordant temporalities. The Royals live by regularity while Diana is disruption, they
tradition and she change, they permanence and she the Fleeting. Through these conflicting
temporalities the film achieves a sensuous intensity, as it also suggests two incompatible
forms of existence.
First of all then, this essay seeks to reconsider the aesthetic pleasures offered by multiple
temporalities, which is broadened into an understanding of a clash between heritage and
retro and between history and memory. Secondly, it looks at the consequences for our
prevailing concepts of history, which no longer seem to be governed by faith in progress.
Finally, it asks what this might mean for our collective orientation towards the future.
Spencer’s 1992 setting depicts the Princess of Wales as the future and the Royal Family as
the past. Its intimations of the end of the monarchy and even of history remain unfulfilled
expectations, while Diana’s eventual demise orientates the action towards a future now
tragically passed. As such, its multiple temporalities express an intense involvement in time
that lacks a direction through it; that is, is emblematic of a more general contemporary
predicament.
Louis Bayman is associate professor in the Department of Film Studies at the University of
Southampton. He is co-editing with Timotheus Vermeulen a special edition of the journal
Philosophy of History on the subject “Memories of the future: post-historical temporalities
in contemporary film and television”. He is preparing a monograph on temporality in
contemporary film, focusing on the notion of a crisis of a normative temporality.
Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon, Filmmaking for Change

In the academic year 2021/22 the teaching team on the BA Film and Television Production
at the University of Greenwich brought online a new third year optional module called
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‘Filmmaking for Change: Contemporary Approaches to Digital Activism’. The teaching team
who initiated and wrote this module, including the presenter (Lee-Jane) and Chair of this
panel (Chris), were intending for students to study, not only historical approaches to art
activism but also the ways in which social action filmmaking might form the bedrock for part
of their future practice, and careers.
Unfortunately, that vision was not shared by colleagues and the first iteration of the module
ended up adopting neoliberal practices, treating “activist” campaigns devised by the
students as Silicone Valley start-ups. The second iteration, delivered by Lee-Jane herself,
departed significantly from this approach, embedding principles of radical hope (Gannon,
2018) and group consciousness development (Fisher, 2020 – via Lukacs and Hartstock).
However, while the first iteration of the module befuddled the students in approaching new
and unfamiliar tech terms, the second was met with a large amount of apathy from the
cohort, making it impossible to generate the momentum necessary to produce radical films
for change. Reflecting on these two approaches, this presentation asks what, if any, other
methods are available to educators who seek to encourage this sort of work in new and
emerging filmmaking talent.
Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon has taught at university level for over 20 years and enjoys
teaching at the intersection of theory and practice. She has made funded short films that
have received international Festival recognition. The End and Back Again was funded by the
UK Film Council and was selected for prestigious film festivals around the world. Shopping
for One, made in collaboration with Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School, was selected
for Aesthetica Short Film Festival. She recently collaborated with The Nightwood Society, a
Portland (Oregon, US) based collective of female foodies and artists. She is working on a
new practice-based research project with a drama short at its centre called About The Night.
Susan Berridge, Shweta Ghosh, Mette Hjort, Tanya Horeck and Leshu Torchin,
ROUNDTABLE: Cultures of Care: Changing Media Practice
In The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, the Care Collective note that even
as “we are hearing much more about care in these unsettling days, carelessness continues
to reign.” This is certainly the case in the media industries where “carelessness” seems
baked into the practice. The myth of the reckless auteur uses artistry and acclaim to justify
abuse. Brutal production schedules challenge the inclusion of caregivers and people with
disabilities. Media industries, from practice to technologies, have been complicit in the
exacerbation of the climate catastrophe. And despite repeated promises and reports, racial
and ethnic diversity remain low behind the camera.
Efforts are being made to transform the media production environment. While there have
long been those in the industry tasked with care, from trade unions to Animal Wranglers,
roles like Intimacy Coordinators, Sustainability Coordinators, Covid Compliance Officers,
Accessibility Coordinators and Diversity Readers are emerging to implement the findings
of reports and to transform policies into practice.
In this roundtable, the panelists present on and discuss these emerging practices with
attention to the voices of those working on the ground. What do these transformations look
like and are they working? Can “care” provide a lens for interpretation of this work?
Although “care” and “carelessness” are tricky terms, risking neutralization for their
implications of mere concern or accidental neglect, these are rendered productive within
their definitions of practice, protocol, and provision. At the same time, this is a category of
work that is more applauded than materially recognized through empowerment and pay.
Are these actions care washing, or can they lead to change, and if so, how?
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Susan Berridge is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at the University of Stirling. Her
research focuses on gender inequalities on and offscreen in the film and television
industries. She is currently working on a British Academy funded study of intimacy
coordination in contemporary television with Tanya Horeck, and a Royal Society of
Edinburgh funded project on the networks of care mobilised by creative hubs in response
to Covid-19 (with Katherine Champion and Maria Velez-Serna).
Shweta Ghosh is a documentary filmmaker and Lecturer in Screen Practices and Industries
at the Department of Film, Theatre & Television, University of Reading. Her filmmaking and
research focus on the onscreen representation and offscreen participation of diverse
communities in film/making. Shweta’s practice-based doctoral project We Make Film
explored ableism, filmmaking and creative expression in urban India and identified
accessible pathways towards a more inclusive and equitable future for the creative
industries.
Mette Hjort is Professor of Film and Screen Studies at the University of Lincoln and Chair
Professor of Humanities at the Hong Kong Baptist University. A member of Hunter Vaughan
and Pietari Kaapa’s Global Green Media Production Network (UKRI), Mette is concerned
with sustainable practices as a form of care. She has mapped such practices through
practitioner interviews with filmmakers linked to FilmLab Palestine, FilmLab Zanzibar, and
the alternative film school, IMAGINE, in Burkina Faso. Mette is the Co-I on the EduHK-funded
project, The Comparative Cultures of Care.
Tanya Horeck is Professor of Film and Feminist Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin University.
She is the author of Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film and Justice on
Demand: True Crime in the Digital Streaming Era. She is currently working on a British
Academy funded study (with Susan Berridge) on sex, consent, and intimacy coordination in
the TV industry.
Leshu Torchin is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. She is the
author of Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet and
other publications that outline the uses of film and media in making social change—on and
off the screen. She is launching a project on the cultures of care, which focuses on emerging
roles that seek to transform the media industries’ production cultures.
Alberto Berzosa, Traces of Portuguese ecologism around the carnations

The first edition of the “Festival Internacional do filme agricola e de temática rural de
Santarém” took place in 1971 and, until the end of the 80's, it was a space where a large
number of films related to the countryside in a wide range of themes and styles could be
shown, from technical documentaries on farming techniques, to ethnographic
documentaries or feature films about life in the country. In its first decade, the festival
accompanied Portuguese history through its transition from the longest dictatorship in
Europe to the democratic system currently in force through the 1974 Revolution, a period
in which economic, demographic and industrial tensions derived from the need to bring
Portugal into line with European developmentalist standards intensified in a short period of
time, which, in parallel, and in response, accelerated the emergence of the Portuguese
environmental movement. Through the films shown in the Festival, the debates and
conferences held, and the specialized literature in magazines such as Celulóide,
Panorámica or Cinema Novo, the Santarém Festival is a privileged space to track the
emergence of political ecologism in Portugal. The concern for environmental pollution was
already present in the editions held during the dictatorship but, after the Carnation
Revolution, the festival opened its doors to discussions on the revolutionary potential of the
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Agrarian Reform, had as its chronicler the main reference of environmentalism at the time,
Afonso Cautela, published a manual on political ecology, and even modified its name to
include an explicit reference to environmentalism towards the end of the 1970s. Beyond
specific films or prominent authors, the “Festival Internacional do filme agricola e de
temática rural de Santarém” is the most important hub in cultural terms for understanding
the relationship between the evolution of environmentalist politics and the evolution of
ecological imaginaries in Portugal before, during and after the Revolution.
Alberto Berzosa holds an European PhD in Art History and Theory. He is the author of
books such as Cine y sexopolítica (2020) and Cámara en mano contra el franquismo (2009).
He has curated exhibitions in museums and art centers such as La Casa Encendida, MACBA
and IVAM. His research explores the space where contemporary art, Film studies, political
archives and curatorship intersect. He is based in Madrid and works as a member of the
research project "Fossil Aesthetics" of the National Council for Scientific Research (CSIC)
and takes part of the Management Committee of the Cost Action TRACTS.
Carolyn Birdsall and Joanne Garde-Hansen, A Dutchman and an Englishman

walk into Flood History: New Readings of Broadcast Archives for Transnational
Futures
In recent years, scholars have increasingly sought to expand beyond national frameworks
in broadcast history and attend to the various transnational flows, cooperations and
entanglements in media production (Fickers & Johnson 2013; Hilmes 2017; Hilgert,
Cronqvist & Chignell 2020). Despite this growing attention to the transnational, we find that
major events in broadcast history continue to be persistently narrated as discrete sites of
national experience.
In response, this collaborative paper tests the hypothesis that broadcast histories since the
1953 flood disaster have been researched in ways that miss the evidence of transnational
co-operation and representation of extreme weather trauma and resilience shared between
England and the Netherlands. Archived correspondence between BBC and Dutch
broadcasters helps to intervene in nationally-framed accounts of natural disaster,
highlighting cooperation, shared experience of and development of radio and televisual
knowledge about how to cover disasters for broadcast media. This intervention seeks to
bring in a strong environmental history perspective to this case, which has been framed by
previous scholarly in terms of (national) media representations of disaster. For the analysis,
we will be drawing on the BBC television drama film London is Drowning (1981) and can
make this available as a link in the conference programme.
Carolyn Birdsall is Associate Professor of Media and Culture, University of Amsterdam,
where she is affiliated with the Television and Cross-Media team. She has published on radio
and television history, along with media and memory, heritage and the built environment.
She is director of the ASCA Cities Project, and is currently leading an NWO-funded project
TRACE (Tracking Radio Archival Collections in Europe, 1930-1960), which examines how
European radio recordings were archived, circulated and re-used in the context of war and
reconstruction. Her latest book, Radiophilia, will be released with Bloomsbury in 2023.
Joanne Garde-Hansen is Professor in Culture, Media and Communication at the Centre for
Cultural and Media Policy Studies, Warwick University, where she co-founded the Centre for
Television Histories. She has published widely on media and memory, television, archives,
and water memories and heritage. Among other projects, she is currently involved in cross-
disciplinary research on the relationship between culture and water, rivers, flooding and
drought, and is on the management committee of the COST: Action - Slow Memory:
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Transformative Practices for Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change (2021-2025)
focusing on Transformations of the Environment.
Joseph Bitney, Surveillance Cinema, The Future, and The Interior

It is a truism of surveillance studies—and futuristic thinking broadly—that the difference
between public and private space has today become increasingly blurred, and that in the
future surveillance practices will bring about the end of any interior/exterior distinction. In
a 2002 interview, for instance, Steven Spielberg declared, ‘what little privacy we have now
will be completely evaporated in twenty or thirty years because technology will be able to
see through walls, through rooftops . . . into the sanctuary of our families.’ Yet in Spielberg’s
own Minority Report, this is not what we see: the film begins with the interior in crisis but
ends not with its final destruction but its restoration. My paper examines this recurring
contradiction in surveillance fiction, looking at how these models of the future, despite their
apparent dystopian pessimism, cannot fully commit to the collapse of public and private
space that they ostensibly think is inevitable. Films like 1984 and Minority Report, I will show,
actually rely on a very particular conception of “the interior” as theorised by Walter
Benjamin in The Arcades Project. In pointing out the persistence of this fantasy of the
interior, I reflect on the ways in which fictional simulations are often at odds with our own
theoretical predictions, and how the inability to move beyond these outmoded concepts in
fiction hinders our thinking both about sustainable democratic futures and about the
dangers of the actual surveillance we all live under today.
Joseph Bitney is University Assistant Professor in the Faculty of English at the University of
Cambridge, UK, where he is also a Fellow of Selwyn College. His research focuses on
classical Hollywood cinema, film criticism and theory, and the modern novel, and he is
currently writing a book on melodrama and the commodity form. His recent article
‘Rethinking the Family Melodrama: Thomas Elsaesser, Mildred Pierce and the business of
family’ appears in Screen.
Anna Blackwell and Lucinda Hobbs, (Ir)/responsible adaptation: editing,

designing and building a genetic edition for the Transforming Middlemarch
project
Kyle Meikle wonders ‘who better than adaptations scholars to retrieve, record, and recast
the [….] material shifts between medium’? He continues, an ‘intermaterial approach to the
adaptive process’ would find scholars ‘traipsing from text to text with trowels in hand’ in
order to recover ‘raw materials and artifacts’ (2013: 181). But how does one best carry out
this kind of archaeological work and, in a way which produces a meaningful digital scholarly
resource and is respectful and responsible in its management of both data and archival
assets?
This paper will reflect on the challenges of decision-timing and creative compromise which
are inevitable in the process of producing a digital edition. How, for instance, the DMU
team’s chief guiding principle was to create through XML coding of the three main texts
and surrounding editorial matter (according to the TEI standard), an edition that would be
comparative, accessible and long-lasting to preserve both the digital versions of the texts
and our scholarship. This often led to challenging decisions regarding the aesthetics of the
edition, but also to a dynamic process of evolution in its look, feel and functionality, in
response to user feedback groups and peer reviews. The paper will also account for the
level and types of curation which the edition delivers. In doing so, we will discuss our
ambition to not only excavate hitherto unexplored aspects of the 1994 Middlemarch
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adaptation but — to return to Meikle’s metaphor — give our users the tools to do their own
digging.
Anna Blackwell is an Assistant Professor in Drama at the University of Nottingham, where
she teaches on contemporary Shakespearean performance. When she is not involved in the
AHRC-funded Transforming Middlemarch project as a Co-investigator, Anna’s research
focuses on the adaptation of literary cultures and bookishness.
Lucinda Hobbs is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Adaptations at De Montfort University,
Leicester and a member of the team who have researched, developed and produced a
Digital Genetic Edition of Andrew Davies’s 1994 BBC Middlemarch adaptation for the
AHRC-funded ‘Transforming Middlemarch’ project. This followed a PhD from De Montfort
University titled ‘Adapting the Role of M in the James Bond Franchise’ (2019) from which is
published a chapter, ‘The Evolution of M in the Latest Bond Franchise Instalments: Skyfall
and Spectre’, in James Bond Uncovered (ed. Strong, Palgrave MacMillan, 2018). Her MA in
Adaptations studies (2013) centred on ‘Race and Prejudice’ with a dissertation on
‘Whiteness as Blackness in adaptations of Moby Dick’.
Lucy Bolton, The Difficulty of Thinking Perpetually on Oneself: Iris Murdoch’s

Existentialism on show in French Exit
In the film French Exit, directed by Azazel Jacobs from 2020, the widowed Frances Price is
confronted by the fact that she has none of her inheritance left. Frances is flummoxed
because, as she tells her family accountant, she had planned to die before the money ran
out. French Exit flirts with existentialism. By moving to Paris from New York, and indulging in
café culture and Parisian society, Frances’s dead pan desire to bring life to an end seems to
be grounded in an attitude that nothing really matters. As she says to her son, “oh to be
young-ish, and in love-ish”. Her disdain for the meaning of life is palpable. And yet, try as
she might, people keep invading her solipsism. In keeping with Iris Murdoch’s take on
Sartre, Frances discovers that it is not easy to be a person thinking perpetually of
themselves. For Murdoch, we are situated and embedded in relation to others, and she
understands Sartre’s existentialism as picturing “the fearful solitude of the individual
marooned upon a tiny island in the middle of a sea of scientific facts” (Idea of Perfection, p.
321). This paper will analyse Frances Price in light of Murdochian existentialism, as a person
trying to be as solitary and self-determinative as she believes she can be, yet attracting care,
friendship, and a network of challenges which demand she realises her choices affect
others. In this way, the film is more in keeping with a view of human life as interconnected
and benevolent than meaningless and individualistic.
Lucy Bolton is Reader in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London, where she
teaches and researches film and philosophy and film stardom. She has published widely in
these fields, and is currently working on a monograph on philosophy and film stardom
combined. She is the co-editor of Lasting Screen Stars: Images that Fade and Personas that
Endure, and the author of Contemporary Cinema and the Philosophy of Iris Murdoch, and
Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema, and Thinking Women.
Olivia Booker, Margaret Tait’s Film Poems as a Model for Ecological

Filmmaking Practice
Thinking ecologically frequently requires moving beyond human-centred measures of time
and space and reorienting towards geologic or microscopic scales, often simultaneously.
Using scale as a helpful concept for connecting film poetry and environmental thinking, this
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paper asks, how might employing elements of poetry within film guide viewers towards an
ecological mindset?
Through examining the filmmaking practice of Scottish filmmaker, writer, and poet,
Margaret Tait, and focusing on intersections between poetry and ecology found in her films,
I acknowledge the pluralistic nature of eco-aesthetics outlined by David Ingram and build
on Scott MacDonald’s argument for reframing a viewer’s perception through structural
techniques. I draw on anthropologist Anna Tsing’s project, Feral Atlas, as a theoretical model
for ecological thinking, comparing elements of its structure to aspects of Tait’s process.
Throughout Tait’s body of work, an ecological process of filmmaking emerges, where
consistent themes mirror and embody the values and perspectives of ecological thought,
echoing the structure of the life cycle of growing plants. These include her advocacy for the
incomplete and iterative, her insistence on close observation of details, and the cyclical
structure of her films. Through close readings of her short films, Garden Pieces (1998) and
Orquil Burn (1955), as well as some of Tait’s poetry and writing, I draw attention to the
ecological rhythms found in her work and suggest that Tait’s use of the film poem functions
as a unique form of ecocinema that can facilitiate the expression of abstract ways of
experiencing one’s environment.
Olivia Booker is a filmmaker and researcher from North Carolina. She is currently pursuing
a practice-led PhD in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews focusing on ecocinema
practice. She holds a BA in Studio Art from Davidson College and an MFA in Documentary
Film and Video from Stanford University. Her films have been screened at various
international festivals and online publications including Big Sky Documentary Film Festival,
AFI Docs, River Run Film Festival and Reel South PBS among others.
Mark Bould, Marjorie Prime: labour and technology, memory and loss in the
Anthropocene
Marjorie Prime (2017) is one of a number of recent sf films, including Transfer (2010), Robot
& Frank (2012), Her (2013) and Get Out (2017), concerned with technologies of care for the
elderly, the diffabled, the socially isolated – and rich white folks. Adapted from Jordan
Harrison’s Pulitzer-nominated 2015 play, it is as close as an sf movie can get to Ghosh’s
‘serious literary novel’ incapable of dealing with climate change. Relentlessly centripetal, it
takes place within the isolated Long Island home of a conventionally dysfunctional
bourgeois family, trapped within the event horizon of their shared history, suppressed
memories and festering discontents. Although the film includes two young women of
colour working as carers, it cannot think about these connections to the world outside its
white suburban bubble – and indeed displaces these two carers through its focus on a new
technology. The Primes combine a holographic projection of a deceased loved one with an
AI capable of learning to become increasingly close copies of the deceased loved ones.
The elderly Marjorie, her memory starting to fail, has Walter Prime, based on her long-dead
husband; when Marjorie dies, her daughter Tess, has Marjorie Prime; and when Tess dies,
her husband John, has Tess Prime. However, just as glimpses of low-waged affective labour
let slip the repressions upon which class and racial privilege are built, so an uncanny (and
seemingly accidental) meteorological phenomenon during the film’s coda lets slip the
climate catastrophe such privilege produces but cannot bring itself to face.
Mark Bould is Professor of Film and Literature at UWE Bristol and co-chair of the BAFTSS
Science Fiction and Fantasy SIG. A recipient of the SFRA’s Lifetime Achievement Award and
IAFA’s Distinguished Scholarship Award, he is founding editor of Science Fiction Film and
Television journal and Studies in Global Science Fiction monograph series. His most recent
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books are M. John Harrison: Critical Essays (2019) and The Anthropocene Unconscious:
Climate Catastrophe Culture (2021). He is currently writing Climate Monsters, Carbon
Monsters.
Andrés Buesa, Moving to Stay Still: The Child, Mobility and Environmental
Change
In recent years, concerns about displacement caused by environmental damage have
become widespread in discourses around the environment (McLeman and Gemenne
2020). Yet, a recent turn within migration studies (Baldwin and Bettini 2017; Boas et al. 2022)
warns of the potential dangers of framing migration as an outcome of environmental
change, inasmuch as it ignores the multiplicity of possible mobilities (beyond uni-
directional, cross-bordering migration), it obscures their embeddedness in pre-existing
power structures (i.e., colonial legacies), and it presents migrants as passive victims.
Following this critical strand, this paper explores films’ ability to offer alternative
constructions of the relationship between mobility and environmental degradation that
incorporate the multi-faceted, relational nature of (im)mobilities. It focuses on the potential
of child figures, as they roam around freely, to subvert normative understandings of
rootedness as passive stasis and of migration as an active adaptation to environmental
change. Looking at films that depict children uprooted by environmentally-related
phenomena—flooding in Beasts of the Southern Wild (Zeitlin 2012), rural gentrification in
The Wonders (Rohrwacher 2014), and unsustainable waste disposal in Costa Brava, Lebanon
(Akl 2021), for example—this paper argues that the cinematic child is used to explore micro-
mobilities as a dynamic strategy to remain in place. Rather than moving away as a form of
survival, children operate a process of “re-emplacement”, by which they “become mobile in
order to counter anticipated displacement” (Farbotko 2022). In the process, the cinematic
child emerges as a site for negotiating the role of mobility in a more sustainable future.
Andrés Buesa is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Zaragoza. He holds an
MA in Film and Television Studies from the University of Warwick. His PhD thesis explores
the uses of the cinematic child, in 21st century world cinema, as a vehicle for discourses on
contemporary mobility. His other research interests include film aesthetics, the
representation of cities and landscapes in contemporary film, and Spanish and Latin
American cinemas. His work has been published on the international journals Atlantis
(2022) and Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas (2023; forthcoming).
Zoë Viney Burgess, Towards the next century of amateur film archives: writing
ourselves into history
As Film Curator at Wessex Film and Sound Archive, I have long been conscious of the wealth
of film material from the early years of amateur filmmaking the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and
how unfavourably this compares with a decreasing quantity of amateur material produced
from the 1970s onwards. There is a sense that the uptick in technological accessibility
corresponds with a decline in items accessioned into the archive – as if the saturation of
participatory technologies somehow diluted the desire to capture and most importantly,
archive these many records. Contemporary collecting is hampered by a scarcity of
resources; be it staff time, shelf space, digital storage facilities and the associated costs as
well as by the sheer abundance of material that is produced everyday by all of us. How can
we ensure the 2020s are represented in the archive of the future? Can we take steps now,
as individuals and as archives to ensure we write ourselves into history?
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Zoë Viney Burgess is Curator of Film at WFSA and is also a Postgraduate Researcher in Film
at University of Southampton. Zoë’s research seeks to explore gender and class in the
amateur film collection of WFSA between the years of 1920-1950. WFSA is a regional
repository for historic film and sound items from Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Berkshire,
Oxfordshire, and Buckinghamshire and holds over 38,000 items. Of this number exist some
12,000 cinefilms. Zoë seeks to explore how issues of visibility, attribution, and
representation impact on our understanding of this regional collection and how this can
serve to contribute to a wider view of amateur filmmaking in the UK. Zoë has a background
in historic textiles and dress and in particular the interaction between gender, socio-
economics and lived experience, as depicted in amateur film.
Paolo Carelli and Anna Sfardini, Italian Unscripted TV Goes Sustainable: Issues
and Practices of Green Representation in Contemporary Television
In the last decades, the relationship between audiovisual media products and places has
increasingly grown and has widely investigated, focusing on the way territories were
represented and consequent touristic impact. Within this context, sustainability has
imposed as a relevant aspect for media studies through different perspectives, such as
production practices (i.e. the adoption of “green protocols”), economic and social benefits
for territories, and growing attention for green, environmental and sustainable topics within
plots and narration mechanisms. This last point of view is particularly crucial to highlight
how sustainability falls into audiovisual representation.
Drawing on continuous research carried out by CeRTA (Research Centre on Television and
Audiovisual Media) on the use of territories in audiovisual products and their function in a
promotional and touristic perspective, our paper will focus on the role of Italian media
production in defining some key traits of sustainability; in particular, we will consider
unscripted TV programs as a specific and less investigated mode of narration and
representation of sustainability. Based prevailingly on real settings, unscripted programs
are privileged objects to observe and analyze how a new kind of sensibility for sustainable
issues could help to spread and stimulate practices and acceptance in this field.
Focusing on a sample of reality-shows, cooking shows and other entertainment sub-genres,
we will try to define some trajectories of an Italian way to sustainability in television and
audiovisual representation.
Paolo Carelli is Assistant Professor at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan and
Brescia, where he teaches Media Theory and Broadcasting History and Languages. He is
Senior Researcher at Ce.R.T.A. (Research Centre on Television and Audiovisual Products)
and didactic coordinator of Master “Fare TV. Gestione, Sviluppo, Comunicazione”.
Anna Sfardini is Assistant Professor at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan) where
she teaches “Intercultural Communication” and “Research Methods on Media Production
and Consumption.” She is Senior Researcher at Ce.R.T.A. (Centre of Research on Television
and Audivisual Products), and didactic director of the Master “Fare Tv. Gestione, Sviluppo
Comunicazione.” She is the author of several papers and books including Reality
Tv (Unicopli, Milano 2009), La tv delle donne. Brand, programmi e pubblici, Milano, Unicopli
2015, with C. Penati),  La politica pop (Il Mulino, Bologna 2009 with G. Mazzoleni), La
televisione. Modelli teorici e percorsi di analisi (Carocci, Roma, 2017, with M. Scaglioni).
33
Hande Çayır , ‘You can see the cracks underneath the wallpaper’*: The ethical
use of film within institutions and the possibility of (mis)representing people
diagnosed with ‘mental illness’
Films commissioned by institutions pose both opportunities and challenges. According to
Iain Sinclair, there is ‘one simple rule: anything that can be commissioned is not worth
making’ (1997: 21). The purpose of this paper is to generate debates that arise when co-
producing films within institutions with people who have been diagnosed with
schizophrenia, bipolar, or psychosis. In what ways can equal agency be granted to these
voices? How can collaboration be achieved without performing tick-box exercises? What
can researchers/co-producers do to protect their mental health while working in the mental
health field within institutions to sustain their work? How can mainstream cinema’s
production of knowledge of ‘mental illness’ (Screening Madness Film Report 2009: 2) be
rewritten through first-person narratives? The response I aim to provide to survivors’ needs
incorporates personalisation (Beresford 2014), not knowingness (Cage 1967: 69), rights-
based actions (Beresford & Russo 2022), attentive listening (Harpin 2018: 41), and
constructive dialogue. I contend that the practice-based approach is necessary to reflect
psychological landscapes because sound and images have the power to communicate
what words cannot (Lambert 2013: 63). By prioritising ethical (Nichols 2016), experimental
(Rees 2011), participatory (Rouch 2003) modes of filmmaking, this project seeks to stimulate
conversations, exchange feedback, ‘be with’ survivors (Frank 1995: 144) and explore the
potential of film.
Hande Çayır is a second-year PhD student in the Film and Television Department at the
University of Warwick. A major focus of her current work involves co-producing films with
people who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar, or psychosis in order to
propagate survivors’ agency, authorship and ownership. Her latest book, Documentary as
Autoethnography: A Case Study Based on the Changing Surnames of Women, was
published in 2020 by Vernon Press. Her short films have been screened in international and
academic settings. Her research interests include experimental cinema, first-person film,
gender studies, mad studies and social change.
Laura Cesaro, Greening Film Festival: the Italian Circuit

Sustainability is developing as a new horizon for the film festival circuit (Monani, 2017). Not
so young is the debate concerning practices, which has started on two different issues. On
the one hand, the trend for festival communities to be sustainable events (from the recycling
of materials to the reduction of carbon emissions, above all to mobility, merchandising and
even food sustainability; dimensions - the latter - mostly connected to cine-tourist practices).
On the other hand, film festivals constitute a space of discursive elaboration that has
developed debates through an ecocritical imaginary (Vaughan 2019; Starosielski & Walker
2016).
Starting from these premises, the proposal intends to advance a historical investigation of
the practices and policies of the dialogue between these two aspects in the Italian context.
The intervention will highlight how CinemAmbiente, active since 1998 and a founding
member of the Film Green Network, is only the first one of the Italian festivals active in the
international dialogue. Next up, we will analyze the "Guida Festival Green" (2022), a
protocol that fully envisages the involvement of the whole Italian festival dimension in
European green programming.
Laura Cesaro is a research fellow at the University of Padua (Italy). Her research interests
concern film festival studies and the relationship between cinema and territory. In
34
collaboration with the CineLands research project, her focus of the investigation is the visual
perspectives related to mapping the territory, including the design of didactic and
educational models.
Amy C. Chambers, The interface at the end of the world: posthuman care,
mental health and memory in Aniara (2018)
Aniara (2018) imagines an Earth-less future with a colony of humans lost in space after their
Mars relocation ship (the Aniara) is thrown off course. Despite the epic SF set-up, what
makes Aniara particularly effective is its focus on individual and collective mental health and
the ship’s MIMA: an artificially intelligent (AI) immersive virtual reality (VR) experience that
uses human memories to simulate the now-extinct natural world. Introduced as a reassuring
display of technical prowess, MIMA becomes addictive as users become dependent on its
somnolent effects that allow them to escape reality and return to nature. But there is no
escape from their self-sustaining spaceship. Early MIMA experiences immerse users into
pre-programmed nature documentary-like landscapes, but the increasingly distressed
users infect MIMA with their memories of hellish eco-catastrophe. MIMA becomes
emotionally overwhelmed by the needs and past in/actions of users and chooses to self-
destruct.
Through this AI ‘character’, Aniara considers the nature of reciprocal care in posthuman
futures beyond mechanical and digital maintenance. MIMA was engineered to feel and
respond to users, but no consideration is made as to how this AI might process the pain of
experiencing the end of the world it was designed to protect (if only virtually). MIMA is
repurposed by users to provide comfort as they are confronted by their own cosmic
obsolescence. In part, the humans’ descent into mental disorder is caused by their failure
to care for and consider MIMA as more than an interface to the world they failed to save.
Amy C. Chambers is a science and screen media studies scholar at Manchester
Metropolitan University. Her research examines the intersection of entertainment media
and the public understanding of science. Recent publications explore medical history and
horror in The Exorcist (1973); the science fiction (SF) films of religious icon Charlton Heston;
the mediation of women’s scientific expertise in mass media; socio-technoscientific
imaginaries and SF literature; and women-directed horror and SF cinema.
James Chapman, The Patient Who Refused to Die: The economic and fiscal
sustainability of the British film production industry
Histories of the British film production sector tend to present it as a narrative of almost
perpetual crisis: certain historical moments – the near-collapse of British domestic
production in the mid-1920s, the withdrawal of City money following the bankruptcy of
Twickenham Studios in 1937, the massive losses sustained by the major production groups
in the late 1940s, the drastic curtailment of US finance in 1969, and the withdrawal of
government support for the industry in 1985 – were all seen by some contemporaries as
existential crises that threatened the future of the industry. And yet the British film industry
would always recover and find a way of sustaining itself – until the next crisis. Charles Oakley
compared the industry to a patient who stubbornly refused to die: “It has been virtually
written off several times. But the industry’s recuperative powers asserted themselves.
Something stirred, somewhere, somehow, and there it was once more” (Where We Came
in: Seventy Years of the British Film Industry).
35
This paper will interrogate the narrative of crisis by considering two related questions. 1.
Were there historically specific conditions for each of the major crises that have hit the
British production sector? And 2. Were there underlying structural factors common to all
those crises? I will argue that the industry’s historic difficulties were largely the outcome of
the same issues – the equation between the availability of capital and the size of the
domestic market – and that it was not until the late 1980s that a recalibration of the
economic and cultural ambitions of British producers helped to create the circumstances in
which a more sustainable long-term financing model could emerge.
James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester and editor of the
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. His recent publications on British cinema
and television include The Money Behind the Screen: A History of British Film Finance, 1945-
1985 (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), Dr. No: The First James Bond Film (Columbia
University Press, 2022) and Contemporary British Television Drama (Bloomsbury, 2020)
Llewella Chapman, The early Tomb Raider franchise: Videogames,

preservation, ethics and the archive
Tomb Raider has received little attention from media historians, and scholarly publications
tend to focus on the overly-sexualised marketing of the lead female protagonist, Lara Croft,
who is commonly assumed to be ‘designed and written by and planned and conceived by
a guy written for guys’ (Roberta Williams, 1998). In part, this is owing to a lack of materials
related to this franchise that are available in archives and repositories, however a small
amount paper documents have been donated to Association M05.com in Paris, including
scripts and notes. Separately, Tomb Raider fans, particularly Ash Kapriélov (Tomb of Ash)
and Alex (CoreDesign.com), have worked to preserve documentation, interviews,
marketing and magazine scans relating to the videogames, providing digital and freely-
accessible online resources. Therefore, this paper will first analyse the Tomb Raider
videogames through the lens of empirical research, including interviews and papers
accessed from the Association M05 archive, Tomb of Ash and CoreDesign.com. Second, it
will highlight how media historians can contribute to the understanding of game
development through reviewing archive materials more generally and how these materials
can and need to be preserved and sustained in the future. 
Llewella Chapman is a visiting scholar in the School of History at the University of East
Anglia. A media historian, her research interests include British cinema, gender, costume,
videogames and archives. She is the author of Fashioning James Bond: Costume, Gender
and Identity in the World of 007 (Bloomsbury, 2022) and a BFI Film Classic on From Russia
With Love (Bloomsbury/BFI, 2022). She has been contracted to write her next monograph
on Costume and British Cinema: Labour, Agency and Creativity, 1900 – 1985. Her article
based on researching Vicky Arnold, Heather Stevens and their contribution to the early
Tomb Raider franchise is to be published in Feminist Media Studies.
Diane Charlesworth, Unpacking discourses of “care” and “sustainability” in the

UK children’s television ecology and television policy. A case study of Channel
5’s pre-school brand Milkshake’s series: The World According to Grandpa
(2020 - present) and Go Green with the Grimwades (2020 – present).
UK children’s television has been in a state of constant flux as a result of global competition
from the mid-1990s, with the arrival of largely US children’s providers, Nickelodeon and
Cartoon Network (1993) and Disney (1995) via satellite and cable, leading to the UK
communications regulator, OFCOM, designating the situation as one of crisis, in its report
36
The Future of Children’s Television (2007). Since 2007, the competition for child audiences’
attention has intensified, with increasing pressure from alternative SVoD suppliers and
producers (Netflix, Disney +, Amazon Prime), social media platforms, and transmedial
content. In this landscape, for key parts of the time between 2007 and today, the BBC has
been the main producer and commissioner of domestically originated content, sometimes
anticipating and, at other times, following key trends in the development and housing of its
children’s offer. During this time, the question discussed by children’s media lobbyists,
regulators and policy makers, has been in how far it is sustainable for the BBC and the
commercial public service broadcasters, (notably ITV and Channel 5), to operate in this
market and still maintain the commitment to providing content that speaks to a British
child’s experiences (in all its diversity, complexity and nuance), and that makes a key
contribution to the economic health and creative vibrancy of a UK independent production
sector. The Young Audience Content Fund (YACF), launched in 2019 and administered by
the British Film Institute, was a response to this question – a source of funding that was to
provide support to a wider constituency of producers and reinvigorate the distribution and
exhibition space provided by the PSBs for this material.
This paper discusses this and looks specifically at the example of Channel 5 which has
demonstrated a consistent commitment to pre-school content via its brand Milkshake! since
the mid-2000s. Until recently, emphasis was laid on high-end, co-produced, locomotive
animation series (see Fanthome, 2006; Steemers, 2010). I analyse the impact of the YACF
on Channel 5’s decision to develop live action/live action & animation hybrid content for
the Milkshake! slate. Two recent Milkshake! series, The World According to Grandpa
(Channel 5: 2020 - present) and Go Green with the Grimwades (Channel 5: 2020 - present)
that have come out of this scheme, are analysed to discuss how these evidence YACF-
intended goals of building a sustainable UK TV production ecology and speaking to UK
children's experience, whilst dealing with global topics of inter-generational
communication and learning (see Holdsworth & Lury, 2016) and environmental
responsibility.
Diane Charlesworth is a Senior Lecturer in Film, Television and Cultural Studies at the
University of Lincoln. Her research and teaching interests are star and celebrity studies,
intersectional politics on screen, children's film and television, and screen histories and
historiographies. She has published in Celebrity Studies and Critical Studies in Television,
contributed a chapter on Kirsty Allsopp on C4 in the edited work, Gender and Austerity in
Popular Culture (2017), and one on Marguerite Patten’s television work for BBC women’s
post WWII daytime programming in the 2022 collection Food and Cooking on Early
Television in Europe: Impact on post-war food ways (Ana Tomic, ed.). She is currently
working on an article about post WWII BBC children’s television.
Mrunal Chavda, Mind the Himalayan Gap: does the brutal gender imbalance
in the Gujarati Cinema reflect Gujarati society?
This paper investigates gender equality as one of the SDGs in the context of Gujarati
cinema, a constituent part of Indian Cinema. Gujarati Cinema, or Dhollywood, has not been
the subject of much academic research (Nagada, 1993; Dwyer, 2006; Ganger, 2013; Kotak,
2018; Jambhekar, 2017). These films produced in the regional language have struggled to
attract audiences in its history of 75 years. Gujarati cinema has risen in recent years;
however, Gujarati cinema has a track record of gender inequality in terms of leadership
positions. This paper examines factors affecting gender equality in directorial or leadership
positions in Gujarati cinema. The paper employed qualitative and quantitative methods to
understand gender inequality and then cross-examined it with the official cinematic policy
37
of the Government of Gujarat. The paper discusses how Gujarati Cinema suffers greatly
from this gender inequality and the failure of the state to address this concern might lead
to the unsustainability of Gujarati cinema a long-term impact. Finally, the paper
recommends solutions and challenges in achieving gender equality in Gujarati cinema (or
similar cinemas worldwide with gender disparity)
Mrunal Chavda is an Assistant Professor in Humanities and Liberal Arts at the Indian
Institute of Management Raipur. He holds a Ph.D. in Drama from the University of Exeter
(United Kingdom). He has also held the Post Doctoral Research Fellowship (Sociolinguistics)
at the University of Cape Town (South Africa). He is an Associate Fellow at Higher Education
Academy (London). He has presented his research papers at several reputed national and
international conferences, including the Association of Business Communication, the South
Asian Literary Association, the International Federation for Theatre Research, and the
International Congress of Linguistics.
Malcolm Cook, Full Circle: Useful Animation, Petroleum Extraction, and

Research-Led Teaching
This paper will examine the symbiotic relationship between animation and petroleum
industries. In common with other forms of ‘useful cinema’ (Acland and Wasson 2011),
animation has distinctively shaped the ways petroleum has been exploited and imagined,
and the animation industry has been complicit with the social and environmental impact of
oil extraction and usage. While the points raised are applicable to a wide range of
‘petrocinema’ (Dahlquist and Vonderau, 2021) this discussion will use a case study of the
1953 film Full Circle made by the W.M. Larkins studio for BP.
While ostensibly made by a British studio for a British company, Full Circle is indicative of
the complex international and transnational nature of petromodernity. Under production
between 1951 and 1953, the film underwent considerable changes that reflect the political
upheaval in Iran in this period as the oil industry was nationalised, with many ramifications
for energy production and international relations. A unique insight into the animation
process and the involvement of oil executives and the British government is provided
through archival materials from the BP Archive.
This paper will conclude by reflecting on the incorporation of such historical research into
present-day teaching of film and media to decentre the curriculum away from the dominant
narrative feature film. It will examine the deeply embedded (post)colonial contexts of
extractive industries and their use of film, as well as raising awareness of the implications of
this among a new generation of learners.
Malcolm Cook is Associate Professor of Film at the University of Southampton. He co-
edited (with Kirsten Moana Thompson) the collection Animation and Advertising and
contributed a chapter on Disney and the promotion of automobiles, oil, and road building.
The collection received an Honourable Mention for Best Edited Collection in the BAFTSS
Awards 2021 and was runner up in the 2021 McLaren/Evelyn Award for Best Scholarly Book
in Animation from the Society for Animation Studies (SAS). His monograph Early British
Animation: From Page and Stage to Cinema Screens was published in 2018 and was runner-
up in the 2019 SAS McLaren/Lambart award.
38
Louise Coopey, Spinoffs and Prequels: The Sustainability of the Game of
Thrones (2011-2019) Storyworld
Broadcast in 207 territories and watched by millions around the world, Game of Thrones
(2011-2019) is one of television’s most popular adaptations. Based on George R. R. Martin’s
A Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels (1996-present), the show introduced its rich
and complex storyworld to a new audience. It is one of many adaptations that have
successfully navigated the jump from literature to television, but the desire of Martin and
US network HBO to capitalise on that success and build a franchise asks new questions of
the viability of the expansion of fantasy storyworlds. As such, although there is excellent
research into reader/audience engagement with the show (Barker et al., 2021), the potential
sustainability of the appeal of the storyworld over the long term also merits attention.
As of June 2022, there are seven Game of Thrones spinoffs in various stages of
development and production, all of which focus on an element of Martin’s fantasy
storyworld or characters. With this in mind and using the Game of Thrones storyworld as a
case study, I will explore the issues raised pertaining to the sustainability of the text. I will
ask whether the popularity of the storyworld is capable of sustaining multiple
spinoffs/prequels and how further adaptation impinges on broader systems of visual
culture. Although planned spinoffs provide an opportunity to expand on certain narratives
and develop characters, I interrogate fidelity to established canon and audience fatigue as
factors that can limit the extent of expansion of fantasy storyworlds.
Louise Coopey is a PhD researcher in film and television at the University of Birmingham.
Her research focuses on the visual representation of the 21st century Other in complex
television, exploring how identity manifests within character development arcs through the
layered complexity of HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011-2019). Louise’s chapter entitled ‘Sexual
Violence and Smallfolk’ was recently published in the volume The Forgotten Victims of
Sexual Violence in Film, Television and New Media, edited by Stephanie Patrick and Mythili
Rajiva (2022). She has also written a chapter on the show’s Epic 9s episodes for Manchester
University Press’ forthcoming Moments of Television series.
Charlotte Crofts, “Beautiful Possibility”: Green Filmmaking Pedagogy, Climate

Content and Radical Optimism
Whilst best known for their sustainable production tools, such as the carbon footprint
calculator, BAFTA-led albert also calls on the film and TV industry to think about their carbon
“brainprint” (Towe et al), promoting tools “to help creatives to make content that supports
the transition to a sustainable future” (‘Editorial’). At COP26 albert convened the Climate
Content Pledge which was signed by a dozen of the UK’s biggest broadcasters, pledging
to “use their content to educate audiences about the climate crisis” (Yossman).
Given that the psychology of climate anxiety acts against us taking action when we are faced
with the “brutal truth”, albert suggests a tactic of “beautiful possibility” to spur action (Planet
Placement). As Nicky Williams suggests, “While the last few years have seen an increase in
climate coverage ... it’s all too often landed in the ‘unwelcome lesson’ space. A lecture we
didn’t sign up for, often delivered by an exhausting zealot” (Williams). Science
communication recognises the power of climate storytelling as Michela Cortese points out:
“Through enjoyment, transportation and identification, fictional films have the potential to
engage the audience and trigger emotions that can lead to action and behavioural change”.
As Mark Bould implores: “Is there no room for the symbolic? The oblique? The estranged?”
(4).
39
This paper explores both the challenges and opportunities for emergent filmmakers
developing their practice beyond natural history and didactic content directly ‘about’ the
climate crisis. It argues that being part of the albert education partnership offers the
pedagogic potential to shape the future of the industry in radically optimistic ways.
Charlotte Crofts is Associate Professor of Filmmaking at UWE Bristol where she teaches on
the BA (Hons) Filmmaking and leads the albert Education Partnership, delivering the
‘Applied Skills for a Sustainable Screen Industry’ module which is required for the
assessment of the Professional Practice modules.
Marco Cucco and Federica d’Urso, Defining Models of Public Strategy to

Implement Eco-sustainable Behaviors in Audiovisual Production: The Italian
Case Study
In Europe, audiovisual production is intensively regulated and supported by public policies.
This set up allows European, national, and local policymakers to influence and guide film
companies’ behavior. The adoption of green protocols during the production stage comes
directly from this policy-driven European model in the audiovisual industry.
As regards the implementation of sustainable practices in the audiovisual industry, Italy is
playing a pioneering role: more and more Italian funding schemes for audiovisual
production rewards companies who respect green protocols recognized by the State. In
this framework, Italian Regions are the real key frontrunners. Thank to work undertaken by
their local film commissions, Italian Regions are carrying on research, introducing new eco-
sustainable practices, and training professional. During the shooting stage, local, national,
and foreign companies are invited to respect their protocols, stimulating in this way a
dissemination process among audiovisual professionals.
The paper investigates the bottom-up action undertaken by Italian local governments and
film commissions for influencing and changing the audiovisual industry working process.
Combining desk research (policy analysis) and interviews, our investigation aims at
improving scholarship about media industry and policy thanks to a case study (Italy) which
could play a leading role at the European level in the next few years. At the same time, it
invites to consider sustainability as new pillar to be included in these consolidated research
areas.
Marco Cucco is Associate Professor at the University of Bologna (Italy), and Head of the
postgraduate Master in Film and Audiovisual Management. He received his PhD in
Communication at the University of Lugano (Switzerland). His research interests concern
mainly film industry and cultural policy. He wrote papers published by international journals
like Studies in European Cinema, Film Studies, Journal of Transcultural Communication,
Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, European Journal of Communication and Media,
Culture & Society, and three books. He is currently vice-chair of the Film Studies Section of
ECREA.
Federica D’Urso is PhD student at La Sapienza University. Since 2005 she has been a media
analyst, specialized in the study of audiovisual markets. She is a consultant for public and
private organizations in writing legislation and policies for cinema and television. From 2017
to 2021 she was an adjunct professor of Cinema and TV Economics at La Sapienza.
40
Jill Daniels, If Not Now: Where There is Power There is Resistance
In this presentation I discuss my short essay film, If Not Now which explores the assertion
that in opposition to notions of waste, and dispersal, there is a grand circularity, of nothing
ever, ever going away; that resistance to nationalism in the past may be a catalyst for
resistance today. Following Michel Foucault’s argument that “Where there is power, there is
resistance” and Stephen Muecke’s argument that resistance may not mean a constant
‘standing firm’; there may also be interruptions. The film is located in Brick Lane in London’s
East End; home to successive immigrant communities, Huguenot weavers, Jews, Bengalis;
today it is semi-gentrified with hipster clothes shops, street food, beigel bakeries, Indian
restaurants and sari shops. My authorial self is represented as a political resister whose
Lithuanian Jewish greatgreat grandmother died in Brick Lane and continues to haunt my
present. Avery Gordon’s view of haunting is as a struggle against the reduction of
individuals “to a sequence of instantaneous experiences that leave no trace”, or whose trace
(as dust) is hated as irrational, superfluous and ‘overtaken’. In 1978 Bengali workers in Brick
Lane, organised the first black strike in England in protest against racist attacks and murder;
but the fascist National Front, continued to carry out marches and attacks. The police
protected the National Front. In If Not Now I experiment with hybrid filmic strategies of
realist archive footage and a fictionalised evocation of the past; witness voice-overs, slow-
motion, long takes, stills and moving image, fragments of interrupted narrative, tactical
argument and disconnected sound creates a poetic montage to bring the past into the
present.
Jill Daniels is an award-winning essay filmmaker and scholar. Her practice explores
memory, history, place and autobiography. Her monograph, Memory, Place and
Autobiography: Experiments in Documentary Filmmaking was published in 2019. She is co-
editor of Truth, Dare or Promise: Art and Documentary Revisited (2013) and vice chair of the
editorial board of the Journal Media Practice & Education. Her most recent essay film
Resisters premiered in Chennai, India in 2022 and her journal article The Way of the
Bricoleuse: Experiments in Documentary Filmmaking was published in 2022. She is a Senior
Lecturer in Film at the University of East London. She is convenor of the BAFTSS Essay Film
Special Interest Group.
Finn Daniels-Yeomans, Researcher Positionality and the Quiet Non-Certitude

of Rosine Mbakam
Responding to resurgent imperatives to decolonise Screen Studies research and methods,
this paper investigates my position as a White/British/Male scholar working with
decolonising and African documentary texts and contexts, and considers the
methodological implications that arise with the process of positioning oneself in film-based
research. Building on existing scholarship in this area (Dovey 2019; Mistry and Bischoff
2022), I consider the notions of ‘slow reading’ (Cavell 2005), ‘reverse tutelage’ (Gopal 2019)
and ‘adjacency’ (Campt 2019) as examples of methodological principles that have guided
my attempts to negotiate the tenuous epistemic footing from which I research African
cinematic contexts. I develop these lines of enquiry alongside the films and collaborative
filmmaking philosophy of Cameroonian-born documentarist Rosine Mbakam, with
reference to the quietly experimental Delphine’s Prayers (Cameroon/Belgium, 2021). Paying
attention to her ethics of duration and deep listening, willed circumvention of directorial
authority, tendency to lay bare the difficulties of narration and embracement of non-
certainty (Oloukoï 2022), I broach Mbakam’s praxis as a generative conceptual apparatus
from which to develop methods of film interpretation and analysis sensitive to the tenuous
dimensions of my position. Where the primary objective of this paper is to flesh out a
researcher disposition informed by Mbakam’s filmmaking approach, a secondary concern
41
is to demonstrate the salience of African and decolonial cinematic practices and cultures
for the present and future of Screen Studies research and methods.
Finn Daniels-Yeoman has recently finished his doctoral studies at Glasgow University’s Film
& Television Studies department. Titled "Documentary and Decolonisation: Postcolonial
Non-fiction Film from the African Continent", his thesis examined the (de)colonial history
and politics of documentary on continental Africa, and is broadly concerned with rethinking
documentary from decolonial and Afrocentric frameworks. He has taught at the University
of Glasgow and Glasgow Caledonian, interned at the journal Screen, curated events for
numerous festivals (Africa in Motion Film Festival, Document Film Festival, Edinburgh
International Film Festival) and has been published in Studies in Documentary Film, Media
Theory, Media Education Journal and herri. He is currently based in Brighton preparing his
first monograph.
Jane Dawson, Beyond Carbon Reduction: Ethics, crew and natural history
filmmaking futures
Natural history filmmaking constitutes the UK’s highest polluting screen genre, with 60 per
cent of carbon emissions resulting from the transportation of crew and equipment to
international filming locations (Albert 2020). As scientific evidence and public awareness
around climate destruction grows, the industry is rethinking the role of in-country crew and
sharing ideas around more ‘sustainable’ practice (BBC Climate Creatives 2022, Wildscreen
2022).
Harnessing current workforce studies (Newsinger and Eikhof 2020, Nwonka 2019, Ozimek
2020, Presence et al 2021), the paper will offer a decolonial reading of the international
filmmaking production cycle before analysing examples of alternative practice and the
position of inclusive ethics in the sector’s narrative to these developments (FF:W 2020;
Spicer et al 2022; Williamson et al 2021). Benefiting from insight gained through
collaboration with FF:W (Filmmakers for Future Wildlife) – an international industry network
focused on sustainable practice – the paper will examine whether the “heterotopic” nature
of the natural history field presents obstacles to forging more inclusive and environmentally
sustaining filmmaking futures (Chris 2006; Foucault 1986). The paper will conclude by
exploring the value of an experientially focused co-creation documentary film as an
interruptive tool of “constructive” reparation to amplify the marginalised voice during this
significant moment of change (Táíwò 2022: 74).
Jane Dawson is an AHRC (SWWDTP) PhD researcher at UWE Bristol conducting research
into anti-extractive international documentary production with a focus on the UK’s natural
history film sector. Jane’s research draws on her background as a creative practitioner.
Recent work includes No California (2021), a co-created documentary exploring regional
labour ethics and representations of coast in the UK screen sector.
MaoHui Deng, How Useful are Dementia-Friendly Screenings?

This presentation examines the ways in which dementia-friendly screenings have been
facilitated and discussed in the UK. The argument that I will put forward is threefold. First,
dementia-friendly screenings can be understood as a form of caring cinema that pays close
attention to the ways in which people who live with dementia and their carers can be more
relationally embedded within their communities and environments. Second, drawing from
Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson’s work on “useful cinema” (cinema that is used to
maintain the longevity of institutions), we can also understand dementia-friendly screenings
42
as a form of exhibition practice that furthers David Cameron’s Big Society agenda, where
money is cut from healthcare services and caring responsibilities are pushed onto the
individuals. Third, complementing the above claims, I argue that the films curated by
dementia-friendly screenings thus far are largely catered to an imagined white audience,
and are rooted in discourses of nostalgia and reminiscence – in turn, dementia-friendly
screenings in the UK, in its current state of existence, can also be understood as furthering
the coloniality of dementia discourses, where the experiences of white people living with
dementia are epistemologically privileged over non-white/non-western demographics.
MaoHui Deng is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Manchester. He is the author
of Ageing, Dementia and Time in Film: Temporal Performances (2023, Edinburgh University
Press), which puts forward the first sustained analysis of films about dementia from a
temporal viewpoint. He has also published chapters on films about dementia in The
Routledge Companion to European Cinema (Routledge), Contemporary Narratives of
Ageing, Illness, Care (Routledge), and The Politics of Dementia (De Gruyter).
Michelle Devereaux The Woman Who Left: Nomadland, Moral Perfectionism,

and the ‘Unknown Woman’ of Neoliberalism
In Contesting Tears, the late philosopher and film theorist Stanley Cavell examines the
‘melodramas of the unknown woman’, films from the classical Hollywood era featuring
women protagonists who are either born or marry into the upper echelons of society. These
‘unknown’ women ultimately reject their lives of ‘second-rate sadness’ (1997: 127) via their
rejection of the men at their centre. For Cavell, Stella Dallas, Charlotte Vale et al mostly
succeed in their pursuit of a moral perfectionist existence, embarking on a journey of self-
transformation and continual improvement as they strive to care less about their place in
society and more about their place in the world.
How might neoliberalism, that nefarious spirit of late-capitalist globalization, have
transformed Cavell’s unknown woman in our own era? Like the films Cavell discusses, Chloe
Zhao’s Nomadland considers a woman who decides to remain ‘unknown’ and embark on a
moral-perfectionist path out of an ethical obligation to herself. But Fern (Frances
McDormand) lives her perfectionist aspirations on the economic and social margins. After
a lifetime of gendered care work and wifely devotion, she is forced to navigate a new
existence of low-wage, itinerant work while living in her van. Because of, not despite of, her
social abjection, Fern does not just reject one villainous male sceptic, as the other unknown
women do; she tries to turn her back on the neoliberal ideal itself. While she is only ever
partially successful, the ethics of her quest lie in her ongoing attempts to realise it.
Michelle Devereaux is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in film and television at the
University of Warwick. She received her PhD in film studies from the University of Edinburgh,
and her monograph, The Stillness of Solitude: Romanticism and Contemporary American
Independent Film, was published in 2019 by Edinburgh University Press. Recently she has
written about Prevenge and maternal scepticism for a special dossier on Cavell in Screen
and has contributed chapters on The Beguiled for the Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia
Coppola and the Netflix series Russian Doll for Television with Stanley Cavell in Mind
(University of Exeter Press, forthcoming 2023).
43
Iain Donald, Account, Accuracy, and Authenticity: A Framework for Analysing
Historical Narrative in Games
Games with historical settings continue to inspire game designers and find critical and
commercial success. They provide a platform to engage large audiences in events, stories,
and perspectives of history through means of nuanced interaction, high-fidelity graphics,
and sophisticated narrative design. Yet, there is a growing, critical concern surrounding the
portrayal of historical narratives in interactive media, and the impact that poorly-conceived
depictions of history can have on the audiences who choose to play such games. A factor
of this critique is the lack of tools and methods to analyse the “historiography” of existing
games as seen in other forms of media and text. The “3A Framework” (3AF), is a theoretical
and conceptual model for analysing games-as-text from the perspective of historical
narrative. 3AF considers the objective game features that appear within the game and game
narrative (Account); current critical perspective on historical narrative and detail related to
the game’s content (Accuracy); and what the comparison between the game’s account and
the identified historical discourse contributes to the historical perspective (Authenticity).
The framework has been applied to Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), Valiant Hearts: The
Great War (2014), and We. The Revolution (Polyslash 2019) and encourages practitioners
engaged in historical narrative – historians, educators, game developers, media analysts –
to approach game-based reflections of history through the lens of players. Considering how
game aesthetics and simulations inform players’ understanding of historical narratives,
particularly where the player’s initial understanding of history is limited, and the
consequential impact this has on their perspective.
Iain Donald is a Lecturer in the School of Computing, Engineering & the Built Environment
at Edinburgh Napier University. Iain gained his PhD in the field of History, an MSc in
Information Systems and worked in the Games Industry prior to joining academia in 2010.
His recent work examines the intersection of games, digital media and history with a focus
on commemoration and memorialisation. Using game design and technology to explore
collective and communal memory in communities impacted by war, the veterans who
fought in them, and to consider how we represent conflict in virtual worlds.
Becky Ellis, A League of One’s Own: Abbi Jacobson the new queer pioneer
The concept of auteur has long since been associated with the so-called ‘master’minds of
(to name a few) Hitchcock, Nolan, Tarantino, Anderson – the list goes on. Whilst queer auteur
recognition is minimal, this is still associated with the male queer voices of, for example,
Todd Haynes & John Waters. This paper looks to reposition queer women at the centre of
the canon. The paper will focus on the work of Abbi Jacobson as a queer screen voice. As
creator, writer, producer and star of Broad City and A League of Their Own, Jacobson is a
visionary and creator, changing the face of queer representation on screen and speaking to
queer female audiences in ways that are completely new. Jacobson recently accepted the
Human Rights ‘National Visibility Award’ for the show and upon acceptance stated ‘We
made this show for you, for us, for our communities. For every person that has ever lived
outside the boring box of normalcy. You don’t just deserve to be seen. You deserve to lead,
to be the center of the storyline.’ This paper will argue for the visibility of female queer
pioneers to be seen and celebrated.
Becky Ellis: I am the leader of BA (HONS) Film & TV at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint
Davids and employed by the British Film Institute Education team on a freelance basis. My
main research interests surround issues of representation and spectatorship across the
realms of both illustration and film. The promotion and creation of positive female &
LGBTQ+ imagery has always been central to my practice as an artist and film lecturer and is
44
something I have explored consistently within my research. I wish to illuminate the histories,
lives and legacies of forgotten and marginalised women and groups by using the mediums
of illustration and film. I have spoken as an advocate for gender equality at Film- and Media-
themed events, hosting gender-themed panel events at festivals including Underwire Film
Festival, Birds Eye View Film Festival, the London Comedy Film Festival and the British Film
Institute Film and Media Conference.
Miguel Errazu, Mining Sites and Contact Cinemas: reanimating the Miner’s
Film Workshop of Telamayu (Bolivia, 1983)
In the Autumn of 1983, a Super-8 film workshop was held with the mining communities of
Telamayu (department of Potosí, Bolivia). The workshop, that lasted three months, was
organized on the basis of a complex agreement between the three agents: the Federación
Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia (a strong Miner’s Union with revolutionary
positions), the mining state company Corporación Minera de Bolivia (COMIBOL); and the
Ateliers Varan, a French association funded in 1981 by Jean Rouch that aimed at using light
cinema technologies for radical pedagogical projects in cooperation with institutions from
third world countries. Despite the cultural and political importance of this experience, the
twelve films made during the workshop have remained unseen and unnoticed at the Varan
offices and the INA, until recently. With this presentation, I draw upon the concept of
“contact zone”, coined by anthropologist Marie Luise Pratt, to reflect on the complex
political, aesthetic, ideological, technological and environmental dimensions of these films,
that I considered privileged examples of a “contact cinema”. Diverse and competing
agendas were at stake and clashed in this workshop: struggles on the right of
communication of the miners, that were eager to take over control of the means of
production to counter paternalistic renditions of their struggles from urban white allies; the
somewhat indifferent position of the state regarding the cultural projects of miner’s Unions—
that in fact were to be dismantled soon after, when the neoliberal policies of Paz Estenssoro
wiped out the COMIBOL and the miner’s political organizations in 1985—and the
‘ngoization’ of radical cinema’s third worldism in projects of cooperation, media
transference, and advisory and consultancy services, in which light media and specially
Super-8 played an instrumental role. These films, taken away from their doers and forgotten
in the Varan offices of Paris, might serve to reflect on the varied cultural dimensions of
extraction and the North-South distribution of knowledge and resources, but also stand as
powerful examples of a mining culture in Bolivia that refused orthodox Marxist frameworks
and show an enduring resistance to the ideologies of developmentalism.
Miguel Errazu holds a European PhD in Audiovisual Communication from the
Complutense University of Madrid and is an SNI 1 Researcher of the National Council of
Science and Technology of Mexico. His work explores the various cultural and technological
histories of counter-hegemonic cinemas of the 20th century, with a special focus on Mexico
and Latin America. He has just co-edited, together with Alberto Berzosa, the monograph
"Súper 8 contra el grano", in Secuencias. Revista de historia del cine, no. 55 (2022). He is
currently a postdoctoral researcher "María Zambrano" at the Universidad Autónoma de
Madrid.
Victor Fan, The Way It Is: Buddhist Ecological Thinking on Power and
Knowledge
In the debate on the relationship between metadata and governmentality and between
governmentality and the cinematic apparatus, there are two common underlying
45
assumptions. First, ecological thinking, especially those frameworks borrowed from the
Global South, is often regarded as an antidote to the Enlightenment project. Nonetheless,
as many scholars have pointed out, since the 1950s, ecological thinking, including concepts
from Buddhism, have been coopted by governments and corporations to build the
foundation of neoliberalism. Second, with the collapse of the difference between individual
and mass and between production and consumption, the gap between power and
knowledge is also assumed to be dismantled. In my presentation, I will conduct a
comparative study of ecological thinkings in Euro-America and China and examine how
they have been instrumentalized under “algorithmic governmentality” to produce very
similar societies of control. I will pay special attention to how China’s recent policy of
“ecocivilization” comes together with its governmental infrastructure. The conundrum of a
society of control is that there seems to be no way out of an ecology in which all attempts
to think, rebel, and recreate have been either preempted or reabsorbed. I propose that
Buddhism as a philosophy, with its axiom of dependent originations, propounds an
ecological thinking that is logically incompatible with algorithmic governmentality. It also
offers scholars a different understanding of how the dispositif operates and what role the
cinema plays in the larger technicosocial ensemble.
Victor Fan is Reader in Film and Media Philosophy, King’s College London and a film festival
consultant. He is the author of Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory
(University of Minnesota Press, 2015), Extraterritoriality: Locating Hong Kong Cinema and
Media (Edinburg University Press, 2019), and Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy
through Buddhism (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). His articles appeared in journals
including Camera Obscura, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Screen, and Film History.
Richard Farmer, ‘Bridal outfits from the heart of filmland’: Clothes rationing,

wartime film production and Gainsborough Pictures’ Studio Hire Service  
This paper explores the Studio Hire Service, a wardrobe ‘pooling’ scheme set up at
Gainsborough Pictures’ Shepherd’s Bush film studio following the introduction of clothes
rationing in 1941. The Service allowed producers to hire rather than purchase costumes for
use in their films, thereby reducing the amount of fabric used on making new outfits and
allowing each producer’s limited allocation of clothing coupons to be used on only the most
important or unusual costumes. Vital to the production sector in wartime Britain, the Studio
Hire Service also played a notable role outside the film industry, loaning outfits – including
those worn by major female stars in films such as Love Story (1944) and Waterloo
Road (1945) – to women for them to use as wedding dresses. In the last years of the war and
the early years of the peace, hundreds (and possibly even thousands) of British brides got
married wearing a Gainsborough dress. The important contribution that costume made to
contemporary enjoyment of many of Gainsborough Pictures’ most famous films has been
noted by scholars; this paper shows that some of these same costumes were also reused
outside the studio so as to play an important part in the real-world experiences of many
ordinary Britons, offering access to a glamourous bridal outfit in a period of widespread
sartorial scarcity and providing another example of the way in which the bond between the
picturegoer and the cinema extends beyond the auditorium. 
Richard Farmer is a Research Associate at the University of Bristol, working on the AHRC-
funded project STUDIOTEC: Infrastructure, Culture, Innovation in Britain, France, Germany
and Italy, 1930-60. He has published widely on British film and popular culture and is the
author of The food companions: cinema and consumption in wartime Britain (2011)
and Cinemas and cinemagoing in wartime Britain: the utility dream palace (2016), and co-
46
author – with Laura Mayne, Duncan Petrie and Melanie Williams – of Transformation and
tradition in 1960s British cinema (2018).  
James Fenwick, Sustaining a load of rubbish or: How I learned to stop worrying
and recycle archival ephemera in the Stanley Kubrick Archive
The Stanley Kubrick Archive is approximately 800 linear metres of shelving in size and
consists of hundreds of boxes and thousands of pieces of paper. User statistics show that
researchers favour material that is directly concerned with the life and work of Kubrick:
correspondence, scripts, costumes, props, and so on. But the Stanley Kubrick Archive is
filled with material that could be considered rubbish – ephemera that was never meant to
be preserved, but which has ended up in storage in the archive strongroom at the University
of the Arts London. Ephemera are transient items that were never intended to be retained
and preserved. As such, this kind of material in the Stanley Kubrick Archive—which makes
up a large bulk of its structure—is out of place, out of time, and potentially out of use. This
paper is based on ongoing research in which the Stanley Kubrick Archive is approached as
a subject not source. The focus is on that material in the Stanley Kubrick Archive that has no
obvious immediate use to researchers—the ephemera—to consider how it is contained in the
archive, its status as rubbish, and in what ways it can be recycled by researchers to give it
new meaning and purpose. The paper will feature relevant case studies, including one
about the archive’s graveyard of unused stationery, such as the rows and rows of empty
boxes, to think through the purpose and sustainability of preserving such material.
James Fenwick is senior lecturer in the Department of Media Arts and Communication at
Sheffield Hallam University. He is the author of Stanley Kubrick Produces (2020) and
Unproduction Studies and the American Film Industry (2021), editor of Understanding
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (2018) and co-editor of Shadow Cinema: The Historical
and Production Contexts of Unmade Films (2020). He has written numerous book chapters
and journal articles on the life and work of Stanley Kubrick. His forthcoming book on which
this BAFTSS paper is based is titled Archive Histories: An Archaeology of the Stanley Kubrick
Archive.
Karianne Fiorini and Gianmarco Torri, A (possible) handbook for the creative
re-use of home movies
Re-framing home movies is a networking, educational, training and production project
launched in 2016 and drawing on the convergence of interests and objectives shared by
Italian film professionals and archives - Cineteca Sarda (Cagliari), Superottimisti (Torino),
Cinescatti (Bergamo) – all devoted decades to the preservation and valorisation of the home
movie and amateur film heritage. The project was carefully designed to promote a
conscious and creative re-use of home movie collections by a new wave of artists dealing
with archival material. The presentation will focus on the details of the training path,
highlighting the main ideas in the background of the curatorial process, and illustrating the
outlines of the creative works developed by the participant artists along the three editions
of the project. We conceive the Re-framing home movies project as a conceptual and
practical toolbox and a (possible) handbook for artists and archivists for the creative
presentation and re-use of the home movie heritage.
Karianne Fiorini is an independent home movie archivist and curator. Since 2003, she has
run different home movie projects and has been a frequent contributor to international
conferences and symposia, while publishing numerous articles and essays about home
movies and amateur films. Co-curator of the educational project Re-framing home movies
47
(since 2016), she is also the co-founder and President of the homonymous Italian
association. She co-curated the Home Movie Day and Night: The 24-Hour Marathon, the
International Media Mixer projects, and an archival web-documentary series focusing on
eleven home movie collections published on the Italian Ancestor Web Portal. As the
manager of film collections and cataloguing (2003-2015), she was also one of the founders
of the first Italian Home Movie Archive (Bologna).
Gianmarco Torri is a film curator working in the field of documentary and experimental
cinema, home movies and amateur films and their intersections. In 2021 he curated the e-
book Open Access Cinema – Re-thinking Film Curatorship in the Digital Space. Since 2016,
he is co-curator of the networking and educational project Re-framing home movies, and
a founder of the homonymous Italian association. Since 2015 he has been a member of the
Scientific Committee of the Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema in Pesaro, where he
has been developing and curating different festival sections and film programmes. Of note,
Gianmarco has acted between 2003-2014 as the co-founder and co-curator of the first
Italian Home Movie Archive (Bologna).
Cristina Formenti, Towards the Eco-documentary of the Future: Carbon: The

Unauthorised Biography (2021) and the Route to Eco-sustainable
Documentary Filmmaking
The increasingly negative consequences of ongoing climate changes and the acquired
awareness of the substantial environmental footprint of media productions have
determined a flourishing of the so-called “eco-docs”, that is documentaries focusing on
environmental issues (Hughes 2014; Duvall 2017). Yet, if looked at in the ecomaterialist
perspective theorized by Hunter Vaughan (2019), eco-docs’ productions are often
responsible for a nonnegligible carbon footprint (see Formenti 2022).
According to the March 2020 report Green Matters. Environmental Sustainability and Film
Production the implementation of existing protocols allows audiovisual productions to
reduce their carbon footprint only by up to 20% prior to incurring in factors beyond their
control. Yet, the makers of the eco-doc Carbon: The Unauthorised Biography (2021, dir.
Daniella Ortega and Niobe Thompson) managed to drastically cut their emissions. In
particular, although forced by Covid-19-related restrictions, they managed to significantly
reduce their travel-related footprint– which usually makes up the highest portion of the
overall emission of an eco-doc –, while still tackling their subject matter from a global
perspective.
Putting into dialogue documentary, ecomedia and production studies, in this paper I will
address the exemplary case of Carbon from an ecomaterialist perspective to show that, as
far as documentaries are concerned, it is possible to break down the ceiling identified in
the Green Matters report. Only, to do so, the best practices suggested by available
protocols must be supplemented with an environmentally thought-out employment of the
technologies and modes of representation and production that are part of the
contemporary documentary filmmaking landscape.
Cristina Formenti is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Udine, where
she is undertaking the research project For an Environmentally Sustainable Documentary.
She is the author of Il mockumentary: la fiction si maschera da documentario (Mimesis 2013)
and The Classical Animated Documentary and Its Contemporary Evolution (Bloomsbury
2022) as well as the editor of two collections: one on actress Mariangela Melato and one on
Valentina Cortese. She serves on the board of the Society for Animation Studies, is co-editor
48
of the journal Animation Studies and series co-editor of the series Animation: Key
Films/Filmmakers published by Bloomsbury.
Gregory Frame, Fight the Future?: The Purge franchise as warning

Encompassing five films and a television series since 2013, The Purge has provided a
sustained critique of US politics and society during a period of economic stagnation,
resurgent white supremacy and rising authoritarianism. The series has provided arguably
one of the most transparent interrogations of neoliberalism and its outcomes in popular
cinema, critiquing the proliferation of private gated communities that separate rich from
poor, the deliberate production of economic precarity to ensure a compliant inertia from
the majority of the population, and the idea that to require state support to survive in the
neoliberal economy is to render oneself surplus to requirements, and therefore disposable.
More than this, however, it has explored concepts that remain largely the obsession of
academics and theoreticians: the notion that neoliberal policies have created, according to
Wendy Brown, ‘an abject, unemancipatory, and anti-egalitarian subjective orientation
amongst a significant swathe of the American populace … available to political tyranny or
authoritarianism’ (2006: 703). The danger of this became more obvious to many on January
6, 2021, and the unexpected success of the Democrats in the mid-term elections in
November 2022 suggest these lessons are beginning to be learned (though arguably too
late). This paper will demonstrate how The Purge sounded the alarm long before and argue
that, if we are to resist the encroachment of anti-democratic authoritarianism in our politics
we could to worse than to heed the warnings presented by popular, dystopian fiction.
Gregory Frame is Teaching Associate in Film and Television Studies at the University of
Nottingham. This paper forms part of his investigation of American film and television after
the 2008 financial crisis (forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic). He has published widely
on the politics of American film and television in Journal of American Studies, Journal of
Popular Film and Television, New Review of Film and Television Studies and several edited
collections, including Screening the Crisis (edited by Juan A. Tarancón and Hilaria Loyo,
Bloomsbury, 2022). He is author of The American President in Film and Television: Myth,
Politics and Representation (2014).
Maryam Ghorbankarimi, Sustainable Strategies: Showcasing Middle Eastern

content to world audiences
Films from the MENA region have been shown in the UK for many years now in a variety of
settings.  Often under the banner of ‘World Cinema’, many of these films have been
showcased in film festivals and specially curated programmes, but some have also seen
general cinematic releases, were shown on broadcast television, or distributed on DVD. In
recent years, with the rise of streaming platforms and a transforming media landscape, the
volume of films from the MENA area on UK screens has increased and different formats,
such as TV dramas, are entering the market. At the same time, recent years have seen
political turbulence across the region which has affected and informed, in different ways,
both film production and its world-wide distribution and exhibition.  
We held a roundtable in summer 2022 at Lancaster, bringing several stake holders
(distributors, programmers, and academics) together to open a conversation about the
challenges and opportunities afforded by the new media and political landscapes, for the
distribution, exhibition, and reception of films from the MENA area in the UK. Combining
some of the key discussion points from the event and our conversations with early career
filmmakers whose films are made available on video on demand platforms, I would like to
49
share some of findings to the film community at this year’s conference. While we believe
this topic requires more in-depth research, these early findings are a great indication of
where the industry is heading and how we as film scholars can feedback to the industry. By
feeding back we envision to offer a sustainable strategy for bringing content from the
region to UK audiences.
Maryam Ghorbankarimi is a filmmaker and film scholar. Her research is focused on
representation women both in front of and behind the camera. Her first book entitled A
Colourful Presence; The Evolution of Women’s Representation in Iranian Cinema (2015) was
published in 2015. Her current research is on transnational cinemas and cultures,
specifically the representation of gender and sexuality in Iranian cinema. Her second book,
the edited volume on seminal Iranian female filmmaker Rakhshan Banietemad, ReFocus:
The Works of Rakhshan Banietemad  was published in spring 2021 (Edinburgh University
Press).
Tasos Giapoutzis, Student Film Festival: A sustainable project

There has been increased attention to environmental sustainability in film production and
exhibition recently. Due to the climate crisis several film studios and cinemas across the
world as well as institutions that support local film production have been making efforts to
engage with environment-friendly practices in all stages of production and exhibition.
Academic institutions in UK (and worldwide) have been making efforts to raise awareness
on sustainable living across the student community while also integrating equally
sustainable practices within the curriculum. In academic year 2022-23 students at University
of Essex will co-organise and produce a local 3-day student film festival in a sustainable
manner, following sustainable practices towards the environment as well as the local
communities near Colchester campus. This paper discusses and reflects on the processes
followed by students while developing their festival, the challenges they have faced in their
attempts to organise such a festival within academia and the potential routes of
improvement for the future. Regardless of the intentions, students are faced with issues that
relate to financial limitations and lack of appropriate infrastructure. Reflections on those
areas will provide new understandings that will contribute to the standardisation of
environment-friendly and sustainable practices within academia and the film festival
industry, while also cultivating a generation of young film professionals that possesses the
knowledge and appropriate mindset in the fight against the climate crisis.
Tasos Giapoutzis is a filmmaker and Lecturer in Film at the University of Essex. His interests
as a researcher and filmmaker lie in the exploration of the filmmaking process, aesthetics of
film and its multifaceted spatiotemporal features. More specifically, Tasos is interested in
interactions between film and memory, nostalgia, place and displacement. Tasos is an
alumnus of Go Short Talent Campus in Nijmegen, Talent Development Campus in Cork as
well as Reykjavik Talent Lab. Films he directed have participated at more than 100 film
festivals worldwide. The documentary Quiet Life (2019) premiered at the Thessaloniki
Documentary Festival and got published at the Journal of Anthropological Films (JAF).
Rachel Gough, A Force of Nature: Film Production as Environmental Threat on

Skellig Michael
In 2014, Skellig Michael, an island off the coast of Co. Kerry in Ireland, rose to international
prominence as a major setting in Disney’s Star Wars franchise. The UNESCO world heritage
site is an area of vital ecological importance as well as being archaeologically and culturally
significant as an early Christian monastic settlement. In the wake of the island’s appearance
50
in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the subsequent influx of
tourists to the site has proven to be a point of contention nationally. The increased visitor
numbers have uplifted certain areas of the local economy, but have endangered the island’s
wildlife populations. Recent research carried out by a state body suggests far-reaching and
long-term negative impacts on the island’s culture and environment, should the association
with the Star Wars franchise persist. Despite this, the films and their associated tourism have
been widely endorsed by the Irish government as providing a vital economic boost to
historically marginalised rural areas. This paper presents a dedicated study into the
ecological and cultural impact of Skellig Michael’s deterioration as a result of film tourism.
It will discuss the projected impact of this incident on Irish media production and drawing
on Donna Haraway’s theory of the Chthulucene, will attempt to lay out a roadmap for
collaborative, community and ecologically engaged filmmaking and tourism models, which
allows local cultures and ecosystem’s to thrive whilst championing meaningful cultural
production.
Rachel Gough is a PhD researcher at the Department of Film and Screen Media at
University College Cork. Her current research focuses on representations of rural Ireland’s
ecologies in film, television and video games. Her other research interests include the folk
horror genre, representations of gender, history and postcolonialism. She is a published
short fiction writer and was recently awarded the Editor’s Choice award by the National
Flash Fiction Anthology.
Tamsin Graves, Prioritising the marginalised voice: Sustainable storytelling in

the abandoned spaces of Gatlif’s Indignados (2012)
This paper proposes that Gatlif’s method of foregrounding issues of marginality represents
a sustainable approach to storytelling. Focussing on Indignados (2012), which depicts
European protests that took place during the global 2011 Occupy movement, the paper
will consider how the film weaves together multiple strands of discourse. The film presents
a fictional narrative set against the backdrop of real protests, uses a variety of languages
including Wolof, French, Greek, and Spanish; and includes dance-as-storytelling (e.g
Flamenco) in addition to the spoken word. At times Indignados depicts the Occupy
movement in the form of mass protest, however the film also highlights more personal,
individual narratives, driven by antecedents to the movement itself, for example of the
homeless in Paris, and of detained migrants in Greece.
The representation of space and place is critical to the articulation of narratives in Gatlif’s
film. In order to offer a sustainable form of storytelling, the film repurposes sites of hostility
such as border spaces and urban peripheries, relics of boom and bust cycles such as
disused factories, and the ghost towns of Spain, and reclaims them as discursive spaces.
Gatlif’s repurposing of space shifts otherwise unheard voices from the periphery to the
centre, imbuing the non-place with new meaning and providing space for stories to unfold
without being drowned out by dominant voices. By choosing to locate narratives within
otherwise empty and abandoned locations, the film offers an alternative to mainstream
depictions of the Occupy movement and opens out the possibilities for multiple voices to
be heard, to evolve and to endure.
Tamsin Graves: I am a final year PhD candidate at the University of Exeter researching the
heteroglossia in the films of Tony Gatlif, supervised by Will Higbee and Fiona Handyside. I
have published chapters entitled ‘Heteroglossia in the musical number: Song, Music
Performance, and Marginalized identity in Tony Gatlif’s Swing (2000)’ in the edited
collection Musicals at the Margins: Genre, Boundaries, Canons (Lobalzo Wright, J and
Shearer, M: 2021) and ‘Identity and belonging in the bordered spaces of Gatlif’s Indignados
51
(2012) and Geronimo (2014)’ in The Routledge Companion to European Cinema (Gábor
Gergely and Susan Hayward: 2021). I have presented on themes such as transnational
cinema and border crossing at various post-graduate conferences, and am currently
teaching on the Introduction to Film and Contemporary French Cinema modules at Exeter
University.
Alyssa Grossman, Transcending Domestic Ethnography: Haptic Remediations

of a Family Archive
In this paper I discuss my ongoing work with a collection of 16mm home movie footage
that was shot in the 1920s and ‘30s by a family of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in
the US. The footage was taken by my great-grandfather’s brother, an amateur filmmaker
who owned a Cine-Kodak, one of the first commercially available film cameras. Returning
to this material nearly one century after it was first captured, I am repurposing and re-editing
it into a new film. As a visual anthropologist who has been researching social and material
processes of memory, I approach this archive not just as a source of information about my
ancestors’ relationships and life histories, but primarily as a framework for intervening with
the material in new ways, for instigating new practices of remembrance in the present. I am
particularly drawn to the haptic and sensory images in the footage, which I am intercutting
with contemporary audio and video recordings of other relatives’ reminiscences about the
family’s past. Through my own remediations of the material, I aim to create a new audio-
visual platform for the existence of multiple, inconclusive, contradictory recollections, and
for conveying the fragmented and elusive qualities inherent to the remembrance process
itself. Investigating the entangled relationship between domestic archives, personal
memory and collective history, the project raises questions about how the camera can
function as a powerful tool to evoke embodied and affective memories through the rupture
and juxtaposition of archival and present-day filmic spaces.
Alyssa Grossman is a social and visual anthropologist whose research explores issues of
cultural memory, critical heritage, material, and visual culture, ethnographic filmmaking,
and the intersections between anthropology and contemporary art. Her work involves
creative and experimental approaches to research, often incorporating audio-visual, trans-
disciplinary, and artistic methodologies. She has conducted fieldwork in Romania, Sweden,
and the US, investigating everyday objects, landscapes, images, and discourses of
memorialization, amateur filmmaking, and family remembrance work, and decolonizing
practices of classification in ethnographic museums and archives. She is currently a Lecturer
in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool.
Özlem Güçlü, Devouring Gaze of Bluefish: Subordination of Animal Life in The

Sustainability Discourse
This paper focuses on the documentary Bluefish (Dir. Mert Gökalp, 2017), which is devoted
to the conservation of bluefish population facing the danger of extinction in Marmara Sea.
Even though the documentary addresses ecological ethics for biodiversity and aims at
contributing to the cause of preservation of bluefish population, it avoids animal ethics
perspective and defend “respectful use”. In this respect, it serves to reproduce human
exceptionalism in favour of its sustainability discourse. In this paper, the subordination of
animal life in the sustainability discourse wherein fish life is rendered as natural resource will
be discussed, drawing upon the association of eating and cinematic gaze that is introduced
in Anat Pick’s inspiring piece ‘Vegan Cinema’ (2018). Following in Pick’s concept of
“devouring gaze” (2018), the formal and narrative choices of the film will be analysed in
52
order to reveal and expose the representational and discursive hierarchy between human
and animal lives.
Özlem Güçlü is an Assistant Professor at the Sociology Department of Mimar Sinan Fine
Arts University, where she teaches courses on film and media. Güçlü received her MA
degree from Central European University, Department of Gender Studies and her PhD
degree from SOAS, University of London, Centre for Media and Film Studies. Her main
research interests are gender and sexuality in cinema, Turkish cinema, and cinematic
animals. Amongst her other publications, she is the author of Female Silences, Turkey's
Crises: Gender, Nation and Past in the New Cinema of Turkey (2016), co-author of Mustang:
Translating Willful Youth (2022), and co-editor of Queer Tahayyül [Queer Imagination]
(2013).
Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz, The Uses of Documentary and Based-on-a-True-Story

Format
This paper argues that film criticism, especially the various uses of documentary and based-
on-a-true-story formats in cultural analysis, largely contributed to the development of
certain influential theories around identity and subjectivity. Despite the recurrent
appearance of documentaries and hybrid film formats (semi-fiction, autobiography, true-
story) in some of the key texts in critical theory about gender, identity, representation and
subjectivity, the impact of screen representation in many critical theorists’ works in the larger
arena of Cultural Studies has not necessarily attracted much attention. One of the few
examples of such an attention is the Film Thinks series published by Bloomsbury. As part of
this series, we find investigations on how cinema has been a theoretical tool for specific
philosophers, such as Stanley Cavell and Roland Barthes. Inspired by this approach, my
current writing considers Judith Butler’s work around identity as a case study. Situating the
role of screen representation within Butler’s writings, I discuss how the medium seems to
serve as a methodology for Butler to investigate in what ways social norms naturalise certain
identity categories and exclude others. There is an underlying question I would like to ask
here: Considering the role of documentary and based-on-a-true-story films in Butler (and
the influence of their theories in the development of queer theory), can we talk about the
overarching function of screen representation in Humanities at large as a research method?
Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz: I am currently an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow
(Level 1) at University College Dublin. I received my doctoral degree in Film Studies in 2021
from the University of Galway where I also tutored and lectured in the field of film studies,
moving image and digital media throughout my PhD (2017-2021). I presented and
published on the interactions of queer theory, subcultures and film studies in a number of
venues, most recently in Jump Cut, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, CineJ
Cinema Journal, Punk and Post-Punk Journal and acted as a series editor of the research
cluster “MOVE: Subcultures, Movements, Aesthetics” on ASAP/Journal. My monograph
Judith Butler and Film: Gender, Cinematic Limits and Embodied Experience is forthcoming
from Bloomsbury Academic in 2023.
Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz, Rebecca Harrison, Christa VanRaalte, Rowan Aust,

Phil Mathews, Agnieszka Piotrowska, Neil Percival, ROUNDTABLE: Ethics and
Praxis – Sustainable Futures
53
This roundtable will focus on workplaces and the ethics of praxis. It will consider matters
such as workplace bullying, gender-based violence, the ethics of filmmaking, and the value
of inclusive practice and pedagogy.
Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz: I am currently an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow
(Level 1) at University College Dublin. I received my doctoral degree in Film Studies in 2021
from the University of Galway where I also tutored and lectured in the field of film studies,
moving image and digital media throughout my PhD (2017-2021). I presented and
published on the interactions of queer theory, subcultures and film studies in a number of
venues, most recently in Jump Cut, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, CineJ
Cinema Journal, Punk and Post-Punk Journal and acted as a series editor of the research
cluster “MOVE: Subcultures, Movements, Aesthetics” on ASAP/Journal. My monograph
Judith Butler and Film: Gender, Cinematic Limits and Embodied Experience is forthcoming
from Bloomsbury Academic in 2023.
Rebecca Harrison is a feminist film historian and film critic based at The Open University,
where she is Lecturer in Film & Media. She has written about reimagining film canon in the
age of #MeToo (‘Fuck the Canon,’ 2018), reported on industry responses to gender-based
violence for Sight & Sound, and interrogated how survivors are positioned in the academy
for MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture. In 2021, she organised a workshop series that aimed
to prevent campus GBV. She has discussed the problem in international news media,
consulted on GBV issues for UCU, and continues to call for change. 
Christa van Raalte is Associate Professor of Film and Television at Bournemouth University.
Her research interests include constructions of gender in action cinema, narrative strategies
in complex TV, and working conditions in the film and television industries. She has recently
published articles on these topics in journals including the New Review for Film and
Television Studies, the Journal of Popular Film and Television and Media industries, as well
as a number of book chapters and industry reports.
Richard Wallis is Principal Academic at Bournemouth University’s Faculty of Media &
Communication and a member of the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice (CEMP). His
research and writing is primarily focused on media work and employment, media literacy
and effective pedagogies for the preparation of young people aspiring to work within
media industries. He was previously an Executive Producer within the Twofour Group where
he served on the Board of Twofour Communications. He holds an MPhil from Exeter
University and a PhD from Loughborough University.
Agnieszka Piotrowska is an award-winning BBC trained -filmmaker and a theorist. She is a
Reader in Film at SODA, Manchester School of Art,, and a Visiting Professor in Film at the
University of Gdansk, Poland.  She is the Former Head of the School for Film, Media and the
Performing Arts at the UCA, UK She was the Director of the global network ‘s conference
Visible Evidence held in the summer of 2022 at the University of Gdansk.  Piotrowska has
written extensively on psychoanalysis and cinema and is the author of Psychoanalysis and
Ethics in Documentary Film (2014, Routledge.)  Its Second Edition in will be published in
2023.
Phil Mathews is postgraduate framework leader and deputy head of department for media
production at Bournemouth University. Mathews gained his practice-based doctorate in
screenwriting in 2018 and prior to this wrote for film and television, and co-wrote the BAFTA
nominated short ‘Soft’, 2006. Mathews’ research interests cover decolonisation, creative
collaboration, romance genre, screenwriting practice and theory. Recent conference papers
include: Motivation and character arcs. A truly global approach or the pervasiveness of a
54
western narrative hegemony? SRN 2022.  Decolonising production practices, NAHEMI
2022.  
Martin Hall, Form Meets Message: Documentary Style and Social Justice in
Agnes Varda’s Feature Work
From her very first feature Varda was celebrated for her ‘combination of documentary
simplicity and modern stylisation’ (qtd in Conway, 2015: 3). This paper seeks to explore the
way in which Varda’s films use documentary sensibilities to deliver messages of social
justice. Whilst it is in documentaries, the form characterised as ‘the flagship for a cinema of
social engagement and distinctive vision’ (Nichols, 2017) that lessons of social justice are
most readily perceived, feature cinema it must be said, has a similar yet often overlooked
potential.
Where La Pointe Courte (1955) evokes the observational work of Neorealism and Vagabond
(1985) interrogates socio-economic critique, it has been said of The Gleaners and I (2000)
that ‘weird and amusing moments morph into Varda’s tone, which is whimsical. Never in
anger or revolt, and perhaps only once seriously advocational’ (Harrow, 2020: 72). Varda’s
ability is to wield both the documentarian and feature language and to deliver a singular
voice which eschews ‘tired tropes from the tradition of politically critical documentaries’
(Conway: 76); a voice which produces work with a naturalist structure highlighting Varda’s
didactic style which lends itself to messages of social justice.
Martin Hall is the Course Leader for the Film Studies and Media & Communication BA
programmes and the Film and Screen Studies MA at York St John University. He is the Co-
Leader of the ‘Cinema and Social Justice Project’ and the Principal Investigator on a UKRI
and SIGN funded Socio-Economic Injustice Film Curation project. Since completing his PhD
in the field of 1960s British and European Art cinema he has published on the works of
François Truffaut, Ray Bradbury, Roman Polanski, Tony Richardson, Jean-Paul Rappeneau,
Elaine May and Woody Allen.
Eleanor Halsall, Experimenting in colour: The film studio as laboratory in

Germany
Germany’s turn to sound film had not followed a smooth transition and, with this in mind,
Ufa’s board began early plans to achieve excellence in colour film development as a matter
of national pride. Planning Ufa’s first colour feature film, Frauen sind doch bessere
Diplomaten, 1941 (Women are Better Diplomats) involved negotiations with Agfa and Afifa;
the former as part of a cooperation pact, the latter to ensure the laboratory could handle
colour processing of Agfa’s Pantachrom film satisfactorily. In order to guarantee correct
sound recording, a parallel version was filmed in black and white. Alexander von Lagorio, a
practitioner-inventor who already held several patents in the field was chosen as the
cinematographer. Shooting began in July 1939 but constant technical modifications
demanded by Babelsberg’s own colour specialists required numerous re-takes and
additional shooting days before the film could be screened in October 1941. This led to
complications with the availability of the stars, Marika Rökk and Willy Fritsch, as well as
director Georg Jacoby. Contracts were extended and one-off fees proffered to keep the
project afloat. Although projected costs rose from 1.45 million Reichmarks to 3.8 million,
the film’s significance for the regime ensured that it received priority. This paper explores
the film’s status as an object of experimentation and technological refinement and
considers how this affected cast and crew when the studio became a laboratory.
55
Eleanor Halsall is a Research Associate at the University of Southampton researching
German film studios as part of the STUDIOTEC project. She completed her PhD at SOAS on
Indo-German film relations and the founding of the Bombay Talkies in 1934. She has
contributed chapters for The German Cinema Book, (2020); The Bombay Talkies Limited:
Akteure – deutsche Einflüsse – kulturhistorischer Kontext, (2021); and An Unseen History of
Indian Cinema (publication due 2023). Her current research interests include women in
German film studios, with particular focus on the role of the studio secretary and the impact
of employment laws on the studio system.
Janet Harbord, Sustainability-Neurodiversity-Cinema

The concept of ‘disability gain’ originates in the collection of essays Deaf Gain, edited by
Dirkson, Bauman and Murray, and subtitled Raising the Stake for Human Diversity (2014).
The introduction presents a persuasive argument that deafness brings perceptual
opportunities and advantages over hearing culture, guarding against the perils of
monocultural vulnerability. Clearly the argument runs parallel to the environmental
advocacy of biodiversity, with both articulations concluding with the same call for
heterogeneity or manifoldness. The question I wish to ask in this forum is whether cinema
can be said to support neurodiversity, or whether cinema takes the form of neurotypical
apprehension. This question is asked of the Hungarian film On Body and Soul (Ildikó Enyedi,
2017), a film whose main character is an autistic woman negotiating a diegetic world of a
slaughterhouse, off-set by an involuted oneiric world where species meet.
Janet Harbord is Professor of Film at Queen Mary University of London. She is currently co-
lead of the collaborative research project Autism through Cinema, and is the author of Film
Cultures (Sage, 2002), The Evolution of Film (Polity, 2007), Chris Marker: La Jetée (Afterall
MIT, 2009), Ex-centric Cinema: Giorgio Agamben and Film Archaeology (Bloomsbury, 2016),
and Autism and the Empathy Epidemic (forthcoming Bloomsbury Medical Humanities,
2024).
Robert Hardcastle and Andrew Vallance, Questions of imagination and

process: The potential of film practice pedagogy to challenge existing modes
of production in the context of the climate emergency
It is now accepted that current film production practices are unsustainable and new
formulations need to be found that address the climate crisis. The issue’s primary reporting
is concerned with industrial film productions, which is undoubtedly important, but this top
down approach needs to be balanced with more inclusive and imbedded solutions.
Therefore, a pedagogic perspective, which considers whether learning initiatives can
influence production methods, is timely. This article proposes that through this
engagement alternative practices can be developed.
Robert Hardcastle is Senior Lecturer in Film Production at Arts University Bournemouth. His
practice-based interdisciplinary research is about devising creative methodologies to
explore the role of sound in the creation of place and identities, and to provide new
perspectives by re-imagining and re-enacting silenced or missing voices. Robert has
worked as a sound designer and re-recording mixer, most recently on television
documentary films.
Andrew Vallance is MA Film Practice course leader and associate professor at Arts
University Bournemouth. He is also an artist, curator and writer. He co-founded Contact with
Simon Payne and together they have developed numerous projects initially Assembly: A
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Survey of Recent British Artists’ Film and Video, 2008-13 (Tate Britain) and most recently the
publication Film Talks: 15 Conversations on Experimental Cinema (Contact, 2021).
Mary Harrod, Mattias Frey, Karen Lury and Sarah Atkinson, ROUNDTABLE:
Sustainability of the Discipline (Film, Television and Screen Studies)
In the past decade, the contemporary audiovisual landscape has evolved extremely rapidly.
In particular, convergences between media have continued to proliferate, such that in much
of the world the consumption of on-screen entertainment fiction is now significantly
dominated by internet-distributed products.  Meanwhile, the ideological imperatives
already implicit in the 1990s historical turn in the Humanities and bolstered by the
contemporary interest in identity politics have led to reinforced interest in the politics of
representation. Pertaining not only in front of but also behind cameras, the trend goes hand
in hand with a ‘democratising’ diversification of the content deemed deserving of scholarly
interest. This includes types of media (themselves in constant flux), as reflected by changes
of nomenclature within field-leading organisations such as SCMS away from Cinema (and
sometimes Television) Studies to encompass Media (and/or sometimes Screen) Studies.  
These and other changes raise major questions about the future shape of the discipline. For
instance, does designating film and television just two options along a continuum of media
understood as an expression of culture mean knowledge of medium-specific historical or
aesthetic considerations risks devaluation? How can researchers evolve to take advantage
of new perspectives in ways that enhance rather than dilute their expertise? What practical
barriers to change endure?  
Featuring scholars from a range of backgrounds in various subfields of Film, Television and
Screen Studies, this roundtable will analyse the affordances, challenges and potential
pitfalls of the apparent dissolution of boundaries in the discipline. Mary Harrod will
introduce the roundtable with an overview of the challenges posed by the increasing
porosity and proliferation of media types across material – including national – borders.
Mattias Frey will focus particularly on the status of Film Studies and film production in the
wider context of UK HE teaching provision. Karen Lury will then tackle the question of
television’s threatened ‘impossibility’ as an object of study, suggesting instead that key
aspects of the medium as an aesthetic form, alongside its increasing attractiveness as an
investment, actually mean that TV studies’ sustainability  is probably more robust than ever.
Finally, Sarah Atkinson will consider how emergent media screen cultures, which include
immersive and virtual technologies and new collaborations across theatre and games
domains, are transforming the discipline.
Mary Harrod is Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the
University of Warwick. She has published widely on transnational screen fiction, notably in
relation to an AHRC network on post-national French film and television she led from 2019
to 2023, while her current interest in the everyday effects of technological change is
reflected by her recent book collection Imagining ‘We’ in the Age of ‘I’, co-edited with Diane
Negra and Suzanne Leonard and awarded Edited Collection of the Year by MeCCSA in
2022 . She is co-editor of the journal French Screen Studies.
Mattias Frey is Professor and Head of Media, Culture and Creative Industries at City,
University of London. He is the author or editor of eight books, including Netflix
Recommends: Algorithms, Film Choice, and the History of Taste.
Karen Lury is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. She is
currently Head of the School of Culture and Creative Arts. Karen has published widely in
57
film and television studies, with her more recent work focusing on the figure of the child
across a wide range of media including, film, television and non-theatrical or amateur films.
Her publications include, British Youth Television: Cynicism and Enchantment (2001),
Interpreting Television (2005) and The Child in Film (2010). Along with Amy Holdsworth she
is a series editor for two television series with Edinburgh University Press, ‘TV Interventions’
and ‘Television and…’ She has been an editor of the international film and television studies
journal Screen for over 25 years.  
Sarah Atkinson is Professor of Screen Media at King's College London, Editor of Routledge
Resources Online: Screen Studies and co-editor of Convergence: The International Journal
of Research into New Media Technologies. Sarah has published widely on the film, cinema
and screen industries including extensive work into the Live Cinema economy. She has
worked on numerous funded immersive media projects and virtual reality initiatives. Sarah
also adopts practice-based methodologies through the creation of her own original works
which include video essays, an interactive documentary, immersive experiences and short
films.
Rebecca Harrison and Syuhaida Mohamed Yunus, Metals, Mouldings, and

Trash Compactors: Artoo Detoo and the Environmental Impact of Star Wars
Whether sharing messages in A New Hope (1977), or supplying data to the Resistance in
The Force Awakens (2015), plucky droid Artoo Detoo helped save many fictional worlds
from colonial exploitation in the Star Wars movies. However, while the effects of his on-
screen actions are discussed widely in discourse about the franchise, Artoo’s material
impacts on our planet warrant closer examination. For every version of the iconic silver-blue
droid – including a 1980 metal prop and a computer-generated asset from 2002 – has made
its mark on the environment by way of mining for metal components, reliance on the
petrochemical industries, waste products, and energy-intensive storage facilities.
Consequently, this paper responds to the conference call to consider sustainability in
screen production by asking three main questions. What materials and manufacturing
techniques did practitioners use to make different versions of Artoo Detoo? How can
comparing the environmental impacts of analogue and digital practices help filmmakers
work more sustainably? And why does historical data matter?
In answering these questions, our presentation draws on scholarship (Bozak, 2012;
Vaughan, 2019; McWhirter, 2022), archival sources, filmmaker interviews, and life-cycle
assessments of Artoo assets created with sustainability consultants at BAFTA albert. We
argue that interdisciplinary research into historic filmmaking practices is crucial to how
scholars and practitioners understand the industry’s environmental impacts to date.
Moreover, by interrogating assumptions about the green credentials of analogue and
digital techniques, we propose that academics can better support eco-friendly filmmaking
in future.
Rebecca Harrison is a feminist film historian and film critic based at The Open University,
where she is Lecturer in Film & Media. Her research explores the systems of power and
networks of resistance that inform how media are designed, made, used, and understood
by different groups of people. She has published two books (From Steam to Screen, 2018;
BFI Film Classics: The Empire Strikes Back, 2020) and numerous scholarly and public-facing
articles. She is leading the AHRC-funded Environmental Impact of Filmmaking Project,
which investigates the lifecycles of props and costumes made for the Star Wars franchise.
58
Syuhaida Mohamed Yunus is Research Associate on The Environmental Impact of
Filmmaking (EIF) project at The Open University. She is an Environmental Scientist
specialising in the application of analytical chemistry and the impacts of pharmaceutical
waste in the environment and on human health, and her research appears in publications
including Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and Atmospheric Environment. She has
consulted for a range of academic and industry partners, and provides the EIF project with
lifecycle assessments of props, costumes, and their constituent materials.
Simon Harvey and Kingsley Marshall, Long Way Back: Developing working
principles for crewing feature film production with higher education students.
“If you have the opportunity for your art to meet activism, you shouldn’t pass that up when
it comes your way.” – Regina King (The Wrap 2018: 45)
Since the release of the feature film Weekend Retreat (Dir. Brett Harvey 2011), produced by
Simon Harvey, students and graduates at Falmouth University have worked on over a dozen
feature film and high end TV projects as part of direct opportunities presented by staff,
through directly produced, co-produced or partnered projects via the Sound/Image
Cinema Lab, a research centre based at the university.
Using our three most recent projects – the feature films Enys Men (Dir. Mark Jenkin 2022),
which premiered in Cannes as part of Director’s Fortnight in 2022 and is due for release
January 2023 through the BFI and Long Way Back (Dir. Brett Harvey 2021) that was released
in cinemas in 2022, together with a coproduction of the short film The Birdwatcher (Dir. Ryan
Mackfall 2022) as case studies, we apply a production studies approach in the vein of those
highlighted by Banks, Conor & Mayer (2016). Through interviews with participants, we
contextualise placements through a research overview that “take[s] the lived realities of
people involved in media production as the subjects for theorizing production culture”
(Mayer, Banks & Caldwell, 2009, 4). We consider how these projects have served as a
catalyst for both learning gain, provided confidence in seeking out other opportunities, and
have helped industrial partners and production companies reconsider their approaches to
entry level talent.
Simon Harvey is the Associate Director with Kneehigh, Associate Artis for Hall for Cornwall
and Artistic Director of o-region, a Cornwall-based theatre and film production company,
which has produced original works since 2002. 0-region’s latest feature film Long Way Back,
was released in cinemas in 2022. He has worked as professional director for the last twenty
years, with a diverse portfolio of experience which includes small scale rural touring through
to mid-scale international touring, working with theatres all over the UK, Australia and the
USA. Simon has a strong interest in story telling, physical comedy and ensemble work, and
works with both text and devised material. He has worked as an associate lecturer on the
Film and Theatre courses at Falmouth University for over a decade.
Kingsley Marshall is an academic and producer based in Cornwall specialising in the
production of short and micro-budget feature films. He is Head of Film & Television at the
School of Film & Television at Falmouth University, and a member of the Sound/Image
Cinema Lab – a research centre that develops short and feature film projects, involving
students, graduates, and the local community. Most recently, Kingsley worked as executive
producer on the feature film Enys Men (dir. Mark Jenkin, 2022), which premiered in Cannes
as part of Director’s Fortnight in 2022 and scheduled for release through BFI and Neon in
2023.
59
Júlia Havas and Nick Jones, Dystopian Futures on Hungarian Soundstages:
Technology and Support Work in Runaway Productions
Over the past decade, Hungary has become the second largest hub in Europe after London
for Hollywood runaway productions. Blockbuster productions such as The Martian (2015),
Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), Gemini Man (2019), Black Widow
(2021), Dune (2021), and the first seasons of The Terror (2018), The Witcher (2019), and
Shadow and Bone (2021) have all taken advantage of the country’s tax incentives, cheap
non-unionized local labour, and lax regulation of working conditions (Sayfo 2020; Imre
2012). Meanwhile, Hollywood’s outsourcing of its screen production to Hungary
ideologically benefits the Hungarian state: it serves to neutralise critiques of Viktor Orbán’s
regime as anti-West through its involvement in global media production chains.
As these examples attest, this transnational outsourcing is the purview of science fiction,
fantasy, and horror productions whose narratives revolve around elaborate digital world-
building and VFX. These fantasies of spatial exploration are in some ways media
heterotopias: fluidly global, yet distinct spaces assembled from international labour supply
chains (Chung 2017). However, it is not the VFX and CGI animation expertise that Hungarian
workforces provide to digital world-building but the soundstages and traditional below-
the-line production skills supporting it. In this paper, we critically examine the ethical
dimensions of this division of labour, and the extent to which it leaves traces on the texts
themselves. To do this, we unpack how Hungary and its screen workforce become one
element in a technological system generating globally legible visions of the West’s digital
future, as imagined by that West.
Júlia Havas is Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of York. She is the author of
Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television (Wayne State UP 2022). She has
published on Anglo-American television, the gender and race politics of popular media,
streaming culture, Eastern Europe in film and TV, and the transcultural travel of media in
Television and New Media, MAI, VIEW, Animation Studies, and various edited collections.
Nick Jones is Senior Lecturer in Film, Television, and Digital Culture at the University of York.
He is the author of Hollywood Action Films and Spatial Theory (Routledge, 2015), Spaces
Mapped and Monstrous: Digital 3D Cinema and Visual Culture (Columbia, 2020) and Gooey
Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface (Edinburgh, 2023). His work on
action filmmaking, VFX, digital media, spatial theory, and 3D has also been published in a
wide range of journals and edited collections.
Natalie Hayton, Democratising Adaptations and Discovering the Archive:

confronting issues of ethics, representation, custodianship and copyright in
the creation of a Genetic Edition of Andrew Davies’ 1994 BBC adaptation of
George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch
Archival catalogues and online resources can be thought of as adaptive gateways to
primary resources, where descriptions and metadata can provide an interpretive
representational function as well as meticulously record details of provenance, format, and
rights. While such a stance invokes debates surrounding the pursuit of objectivity, once
valorised across the archive sector, this approach has been readily adopted by the team of
the AHRC-funded project to create a Genetic Edition of Andrew Davies’ 1994 BBC
adaptation of George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch (1871-2).
This paper will interrogate the online scholarly Edition’s democratising aim to provide an
Open Access full production history that foregrounds the collaborative nature of the
process of adaptation using archival material. An exploration of how it selects, integrates
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and showcases previously, un/published resources while contextualising them within an
interpretive framework reveals how confronting issues surrounding archival custodianship,
copyright and provenance complements that aim.
Discovering, aggregating and adapting a range of archival media throughout the course of
the development of the Edition has seen the whole team engaged in its own process of
adaptation as well as archival practices of appraisal and selection. But what has led those
far from objective decisions? How do we choose what to ‘keep’ and how to represent it?
Natalie Hayton is an Archivist in Special Collections at De Montfort University, Leicester,
UK. Having completed her PhD in English and Adaptation Studies at De Montfort University
in 2013, Natalie secured a post-doctoral position to co-organise and launch the Andrew
Davies archival collection. Qualifying as an archivist in 2020 from the University of Dundee,
she is a member of the Archives and Records Association (UK and Ireland). Her research
interests include archives and pedagogy, appraisal theory and the democratisation of the
archive. 
Matthew Hilborn, 'Controversies of the Streaming Age – Spain and the Torrente
Saga (dir. Santiago Segura, 1998, 2001, 2005, 2011, 2014)'
This paper explores the ongoing anxieties in Spanish cinema over how best to preserve,
remember, or forget its offensive, cinematic bogeyman: the outrageously fascist, racist,
sexist ex-cop “Torrente”. From 1998-2014, this obese, politically-incorrect monstrosity
starred in five blockbuster films, becoming by far its highest-grossing franchise ever.
Nevertheless, the establishment largely snubbed this awkward eyesore (Merás 2014), a
polemical inclusion within film histories that, debut notwithstanding, was largely snubbed
for key awards. Yet, while an American remake starring Sacha Baron Cohen has seemingly
vanished, and foul-mouthed copycats have failed to land, rumours of Torrente 6 have
persistently circulated in recent years, fomented not least by its actor, creator, and director,
Santiago Segura, who claimed, in late 2022, to have completed a script. Moreover,
continuing parodies and retrospectives (e.g., Fotogramas’ 2021 showcase), and the rise of
the arguably ‘Torrentian’ far-right party Vox, demonstrate enduring relevance. Discussing
the ethical burdens on streaming services, and taboo viewing ‘as social practice’ (Jenks
1995: 2) combining scopophilia and scopophobia, I explore a deliberate purpose to offend,
asking, What do we do with Torrente? The most ‘representative’ national franchise, featuring
sharp sociopolitical satire, a who’s who of Spanish acting talent, and cameos from
celebrities, politicians, and sportspeople – and, simultaneously, the most distasteful comedy
imaginable? In 2020-21, streaming services FlixOlé, Filmin, and Netflix ES added the saga:
moves so controversial that senior executives offered public justifications, and star Neús
Asensi came out to complain about her treatment on-set 20+ years prior. Lately, Segura has
pivoted toward feminist, family-friendly comedies, playing gentler fathers learning respect
for motherhood. Yet, is Spain ready to shun white-supremacist, machista terror in favour of
women, minorities, and immigrants? Or, despite its protestations, does it crave more
Torrente?
Matthew Hilborn is an interdisciplinary researcher at King’s College, London, specialising
in European Film, Media & Cultural Studies, His AHRC-funded PhD thesis, ‘Side-Splitting:
Humour and National Identity in Contemporary Spanish Cinema’, completed in 2021,
explores the ubiquity, evolution, and political impact of comedy across the last 50 years of
Spanish film, tracing how laughter can defuse but also intensify sociopolitical tensions at
key junctures in national history. His current project, ‘Screen Encounters with Britain’ (AHRC),
investigates how transnational video-on-demand services like Netflix and YouTube affect
the nature and extent of European audiences' digital encounters with the UK.
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Simon Hobbs and Megan Hoffman, Confronting a Genre: The Ethical
Implications of Post #MeToo True Crime
The current fascination with true crime sits uneasily in a society still newly attuned to
concerns with systemic violence and misogyny brought to light by the #MeToo movement.
Across the contemporary media landscape, stories of serial killers, family annihilators and
puzzling cold cases vie to intrigue and entertain audiences with familiar true crime tropes
that centre male killers and fetishise a forensic focus on the destroyed female body.
However, against a backdrop of civil activism, some true crime producers are challenging
the ethical issues that have plagued the genre. These new narratives shift the focus from
killers to victims and to the systemic failures that made those victims vulnerable to violent
crime.
In order to critically assess the success of such productions in challenging the true crime
genre’s exploitative tendencies, this paper focuses on Joe Berlinger’s Confronting a Serial
Killer (2021). We explore how the show’s host, Jillian Lauren, uses her own experiences with
domestic abuse and sex work to question serial killer Sam Little’s own self-narration, giving
voice to otherwise disenfranchised victims and lending both authority and sensitivity to her
discussions of the systemic violence, racism and misogyny that defined his crimes. In doing
so, we identify Confronting a Serial Killer as a key text in a new wave of ethical true crime
production which uses strategies shaped by the #MeToo movement to contest male-
dominated narratives of violence.
Simon Hobbs is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at the University of Portsmouth. His
research areas include extreme art cinema, fandom, material culture, and true crime. His
work has been published in several edited collections and journals, including Transnational
Cinemas (Taylor & Francis, 2015), Popular Media Cultures: Fans, Audiences and Paratexts
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (Bloomsbury, 2016),
Critiquing Violent Crime in the Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), and Crime Fiction Studies
(2022). He is the author of Cultivating Extreme Art Cinema: Text, Paratext and Home Video
Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
Megan Hoffman is an independent scholar. Her research interests include crime fiction,
true crime, popular culture and gender studies. She is the author of Gender and
Representation in British 'Golden Age' Crime Fiction: Women Writing Women (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016). Her work has also been published in journals and edited collections
including Crime Fiction Studies (2022), Critiquing Violent Crime in the Media (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2021), 100 British Crime Writers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 100 American
Crime Writers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Murdering Miss Marple: Essays on Gender
and Sexuality in the New Golden Age of Women’s Crime Fiction (McFarland & Co., 2012).
Christopher Holliday, “A poor attempt to replicate my work”: The remixed

soundcapes of digital de-aging
Within the VFX spectacle of Hollywood cinema’s expanding digital de-aging processes, a
vital (if often overlooked) component of the virtual recreation of youth has been the
application of archival voice recordings, synthesized speech technology, and machine
learning to seamlessly ‘cast’ popular stars as their younger selves. Sidestepping any
requirement for secondary vocal impersonations, the digitised re-conjuring of youthful star
sound in popular film and television (mirroring the rise of posthumous voicework in recent
animated features) has been facilitated by sophisticated developments in sound recording
technologies, from increased storage capabilities to audio-mixing techniques. The
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emergence of specialised companies (such as Ukrainian tech startup Respeecher and U.S.-
based Replica Studios, Descript, and Modulate) has also helped to develop voice-altering
technologies and provide modulated voice cloning to accompany Hollywood’s pristine de-
aged visuals. This paper explores the sonic dimension of the de-aged virtual body within
contemporary media culture’s increasingly post-mortem soundscape. It argues that such
de-aged voicework is firmly implicated in the broader “ethical and aesthetic uncertainty” of
de-aging technologies, including the “ethical (and legal) questions” regarding the
“respectful” posthumous application of a star’s image and vocal performances after death
(Holliday 2022: 220). By examining the relationship between a star’s potent vocal signature
and intellectual copyright – alongside the vexed relationship between property law and “the
commercial imitation and simulation of recorded sounds” (Gaines 1991: 130) – this paper
suggests that the vocal “technological reconstitution” and digital compositing central to
computerised “posthumous” performances (Bode 2010) raise further questions about de-
aging’s claims to (un)ethical enaction and (dis)embodiment.
Christopher Holliday is Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education at King’s
College London, specializing in Hollywood cinema, animation history, and contemporary
digital media. He has published on digital technology and computer animation, and is the
author of The Computer Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre (EUP, 2018), and co-editor
of the anthologies Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres
(Routledge, 2018) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives on Production,
Reception, Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2021). Christopher is currently researching the
relationship between identity politics and digital technologies in popular cinema, and is the
curator of the website/blog/podcast www.fantasy-animation.org.
Bella Honess Roe, Flee (2021), animated documentary and the ethics of
empathy
Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021)’s emotional resonance and ‘humanising’ re-telling of a
child refugee’s flight from Afghanistan is frequently commented on in its glowing reviews
and the film has received an almost overwhelmingly positive response since its premiere at
the Sundance Film Festival in 2021. This paper will explore why this particular refugee story
has resonated so strongly with critics and audiences, despite similar stories having been
told many times before in documentary, fiction and, especially since start of the Syrian civil
war in 2011, on the news. Building on my earlier work on the ‘evocative’ capacity of
animated documentary, I will use Flee as a case study to dig deeper into questions of
empathy, imagination and ethics. 
Flee is one example of many animated documentaries that give insight into experiences
that the majority of viewers will have no personal experience of (in this case, being a child
refugee). Many of these types of animated documentaries actively discourage empathy,
primarily by not providing individual characters that engage us on an emotional level, and
instead enable viewers to know rather than feel what something is like. The response
to Flee as ‘humanising’ would suggest that is not the case with this film and that it does invite
us to ‘imagine from the inside’ (Eder 2016, 87) and feel with the subjects. However, and as I
will explore in this paper, Flee’s anonymising of ‘Amin’ and universalisation of his story,
along with its centring of the director raises questions of what and how Flee’s animation is
asking us to imagine and emotionally engage with. 
Bella Honess Roe teaches Film Studies at the University of Surrey in the UK. She has
published widely on animated documentary, including a 2013 award-winning monograph,
and several articles and book chapters. Recently she has been exploring the intersection of
imagination, empathy and animated documentary. She is also co-edited Vocal Projections:
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Voices in Documentary (Bloomsbury, 2018), The Animation Studies Reader (Bloomsbury,
2018) and edited Aardman Animations: Beyond Stop-Motion (Bloomsbury, 2020).
Tanya Horeck, True Crime TikTok: On Ethics and Algorithms

In the post #MeToo media landscape, true crime representations continue to flourish. Public
discussion of the realities of systemic sexual violence has led to greater attentiveness to
ethical issues around screening true crime, particularly as it concerns the representation of
victims and gendered forms of violence. However, the expansion of true crime across social
media platforms, including true crime TikTok, raises new questions about ethics and
accountability – especially regarding audience participation in the genre. To date, there are
5.6 billion uses of the hashtag #truecrime on TikTok. This paper explores the rise of true
crime TikTok with a focus on content responding to sexual and gender-based violence in
true crime cases and TV series. Drawing from recent scholarship on the TikTok algorithm
(Abidin 2020; Burgess et. al 2022), the paper analyses a sample of user videos to examine
how true crime content creators negotiate the tension between an individualized
understanding of sensational criminal cases and an awareness of the broader structural
underpinnings of sexual and gender-based violence. What affective publics (Papacharissi
2014) are formed through true crime TikTok and to what extent does the app enable
feminist digital activism against rape culture (see Mendes et. al)? The paper addresses these
questions through a broader discussion of the role true crime TikTok might play in
furthering understanding of a feminist analysis of #MeToo.
Tanya Horeck is Professor of Film and Feminist Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin University.
She is the author of Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film and Justice on
Demand: True Crime in the Digital Streaming Era. She is currently working on a British
Academy funded study (with Susan Berridge) on sex, consent, and intimacy coordination in
the TV industry.
Kierran Horner, Existential Conflict versus an Ethical Self: Intersubjective

Relations and Mortality in Beauvoir, Sartre and Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7
Pursuing a central theme of death’s proximity to life, this paper is concerned with the
contrasting ways in which Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre depict intersubjective
encounters and how death enters into these communications between subjects. Through a
close reading of Agnès Varda’s pivotal Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), it argues that the film reflects
such ideas of the proximity of death to life, an ethical responsibility for the mortality of others
and oscillations between attitudes of subjectivity and objectivity. Resisting the
intersubjective antagonism which is inherent in Sartre’s early philosophy as a patriarchal
construct, Beauvoir’s version of existentialism presents a reciprocity without conflict within
intersubjectivity that amounts to an ethical relation with the Other. This latter relation
between subjects is also addressed in Cléo, in which Varda undermines the binary
oppositions and (Sartrean) hierarchical frameworks – in which the masculine is subject and
the feminine Other – that Beauvoir combats in her signal works. Instead, Cléo embodies
attitudes of subject and Other and moves towards an implicitly Beauvoirian viewpoint,
accepting her own mortality and her responsibility for the death of the Other. Cléo’s
feminine subjectivity is ambivalent, in a state of persistent becoming, an ongoing process
of reiteration.
Kierran Horner’s current research investigates ethical representations of female suicide in
post-war European film. Their recent monograph, Haunting the Left Bank (Peter Lang, 2023),
takes a feminist-philosophical approach to themes of mortality and intersubjectivity in the
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films of Varda, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. They held the post of Honorary Postdoctoral
Visiting Research Fellow in Film Studies at King’s College London whilst preparing this book
for publication. Engaging with topics such as Pop Art, phenomenology, pregnancy and
gendered roles, Kierran has published articles in journals such as L’Esprit createur, Film
Philosophy, Studies in French Cinema, Studies in European Cinema, Mise au Point and Film
International.
Yushi Hou, The environment in Contemporary Chinese Surveillance Cinema:

The “naked city” and Ethics
This paper borrows Michel Foucault’s Panopticon and the term “surveillance cinema” that I
quote from Catherine Zimmer, to consider the representation of urban space in a series of
contemporary Chinese crime thrillers related to CCTV monitoring, which I name Chinese
surveillance cinema. These surveillance cinemas include Johnnie To’s Drug War (2012), Xu
Bing’s Dragonfly’s Eyes (2017), Jia Zhangke’s Ash Is purist White (2017), and Lou Ye’s The
Shadow Play (2018). Drawing attention to the urban anxiety originating from all-pervasive
surveillance, my research tries to concentrate on the audio-visual representation of CCTV
monitoring in these crime thrillers, and how the surveillance elements interact with the
crime theme, as well as linking to the profound social-political context in mainland China.
These films more or less unveil that when the Skynet Project (Tianwang Project) and the
Sharp Eyes Project (Xueliang Project) have been put into effect in PRC under the slogan of
Safe City, previous underground orders and imaginary space of “Jianghu” have been
crumbled, replaced by a superficial peacefulness brought on by the surveillance network
and high-tech police force. However, I argue that a sense of fear, possibly related to the
panoramic gaze, invisible monitoring, and the transparency of personal privacy, hence also
become a new origin of urban anxiety, permeating through the dark tone of these Chinese
crime films.
Yushi Hou received her PhD at the Film Department, the University of Southampton in
2022. Her PhD thesis is about Urban Space in Contemporary Chinese Neo-noir, her research
interests also include East Asian cinema, Chinese film industry, genre studies, and cinematic
space. She has published on contemporary Chinese femme fatale figure, and female spies
in Chinese cold war cinema.
May Adadol Ingawanij, Animistic Apparatus as a Curatorial Method

Focusing on her experience of developing Animistic Apparatus as a curatorial method of
creating and thinking, May will discuss how this led to her conceptualisation of artists
moving image as cosmological poetics attentive to fabulating kinship and figuring space as
potency, and attuned to agency in vulnerability. Animistic Apparatus (together with Julian
Ross) grew out of her study of the ritual uses of itinerant film projection around Thailand
and neighbouring territories since the Cold War period. From that research she began to
entertain the idea of an affinity or contemporaneity of sorts between the previous century’s
ritual practices of projecting films for spirits, and present-day artists’ moving image
practices in and connected with Southeast Asia. As the project took shape, a notion
emerged: that artistic and ritual practices might be thought in comparative and relational
terms as repertoires of agency for humans who are precarious. Through curatorial practice,
we might approach artistic practices as animistic practices that make relations and affirm
social bonds connecting those precarious humans with other beings in common, and both
practices as related repertoires of agency of the powerless and the displaced in specific
conjunctures of colonialism and global capitalism. Like animistic film-projection rituals,
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artists’ moving image might be thought of as a practice of agency of those precarious and
vulnerable humans who seek new orientations toward other possible futures.
May Adadol Ingawanij // เม อาดาดล อิงคะวณิ ช is a writer, curator, and teacher. She works
on Southeast Asian contemporary art; de-westernised and decentred histories and
genealogies of cinematic arts; avant-garde legacies in Southeast Asia; forms of future-
making in contemporary artistic and curatorial practices; aesthetics and circulation of artists’
moving image, art and independent films belonging to or connected with Southeast Asia.
She is Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Westminster where she co-directs the
Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media. Recent curatorial projects include
Legacies, Animistic Apparatus. Recent writings published in Afterall, Screen journal,
Southeast of Now journal, New Left Review, MIT Press.
Jady Jiang, Retro-Technology, Hauntology, and the Uncanny Sustainability in

The Skeleton Key
The sustaining of culture is far from a straightforward process. This is addressed directly by
Derrida’s concept of ‘hauntology’ and Mark Fisher’s development of the idea.1 Fisher’s
theory focuses on the cancellation of the future and the fanaticism towards the past.2
Hauntology in cinema is particularly apparent in music as embodied by technology,
particularly retro-technology.
This hauntological tendency is clear in the revival of technologies. The Skeleton Key (Iain
Softley, 2005) is a film that emphasizes the phonograph, a music-playing apparatus that is
able to connect the present with the uncanny past, resorting to its both its striking antique
appearance and distinctive lo-fi sound quality. The surprising sustainability of such archaic
technologies showcases the nostalgic aesthetics and hauntological values in recent cinema,
suggesting an inability to get beyond historical trauma and cultures of reminiscence.
While the phonograph is the vector of music, we could also find a sense of sustainability
ontologically via the original context of music – here, the blues music played by the
phonograph in The Skeleton Key, especially film’s use of and referencing delta-blues. This
type of blues music has a remarkable association with the deep black history, which attaches
a strong sense of melancholy due to the oppressed culture behind the music. The historical
background of this music genre evokes mnemonic cultural remembrance, enhancing a
sense of nostalgia and sustainability. Although its reuse removes some of its cultural
specificity to repurpose it as universal.
This paper aims to discuss the curious sustainability of old technology and musical
recordings through cinema as a distinct form of technological hauntology, through
addressing The Skeleton Key, a film that thematizes America’s inability to have a future
without dealing with its past.
Jady Jiang is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Film Department at the University of
Southampton, UK. Her thesis addresses music and enigma in films, looking into how music
can be used to create aesthetic confusion and a space for conceptual potential. She has a
book chapter ‘Sonic Novelty and Conceptual Obscurity: Music, Landscape and Enigma in
Picnic at Hanging Rock’ in Haunted Soundtracks, edited by K. J. Donnelly and Aimee
Mollaghan (Bloomsbury, 2023 in press). She has presented papers at the SCMS 2022 and
‘Music and the Moving Image’ conference at NYU in 2020.
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Esther Johnson, DUST & METAL: a cinematic reflection on Vietnam’s love affair
with motorbikes
DUST & METAL (CÁT BỤI & KIM LOẠI) brings together for the first time, a live cinema
documentary feature film using little seen archive film from Hanoi-based Vietnam Film
Institute (VFI). Directed by Esther Johnson, the project has resulted in a unique partnership
with TPD: The Centre for Assistance and Development of Movie Talents, and with VFI for
digitising rare archive film. With a score composed by electronic artist Xo Xinh, and sound
design by artist Nhung Nguyễn, the global pandemic has led to creative collaborative co-
production methods for the production between the UK, Vietnam and US.
Funded by the British Council, DUST & METAL steps away from Hollywood’s portrayals of
the American/Vietnam War, to instead offer an unorthodox perspective of Vietnam past and
present. Alternative perspectives of Vietnamese cultural heritage are told through the
synergy of difficult to access archive film, crowd-sourced material, and newly shot footage.
At the heart of the research are unfamiliar histories of freedom in Vietnam that connect with
the country’s ubiquitous mode of transport: the MOTORBIKE. With a population of 97
million, and 45 million registered motorbikes (the highest in SE Asia) that’s almost one bike
for every two people. The countries urban roads and ‘hẻm’ alleys are only accessible by two-
wheels. These roads are awash with the transportation of goods of all types and sizes on the
back of motorbikes, including washing machines, entire families, and chickens.
This presentation will comprise extracts from DUST & METAL and discuss the research
methodologies used in production, including learnings from the first ever partnership the
Vietnam Film Institute has undertaken with an artist and filmmaker.
Esther Johnson (MA, RCA) works at the intersection of artist moving image and
documentary. She is former recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Research Prize, and is
Professor of Film and Media Arts at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Esther’s poetic portraits
focus on alternative social histories and marginal worlds, to reveal resonant stories that may
otherwise remain hidden or ignored. The repositioning of archival material is explored as a
way of looking at intangible cultural heritage, and of addressing the relationship between
memory and storytelling. Work has exhibited in 40+ countries, and broadcast on BBC and
Channel 4.
Sophia Kanaouti, Arendt’s “political space”: “Killing Eve”, real politics, and the
feminist politics of the woman psychopath
The paper examines Arendt’s notion of “political space”, the democratic “space between
men (people, here)” with a view to two juxtaposed instances of violence and corruption:
Killing Eve, where the woman psychopath creates a “political space”, a space of democracy
and listening, between her and the woman she loves, and the recent political reality of the
EU parliament, where two Greek women politicians are being investigated (and one jailed)
for corruption. In Killing Eve, Villanelle, the assassin, is vulnerable towards Eve, the woman
she desires.
In the way the story of one of the women members of EU parliament is told, the jailed Eva
Kaili puts the blame on her partner (albeit a male partner), and insists she didn’t know he
was bringing corrupt money into their home (she does not address the millions her father
was carrying in a bag). Desire, in that instance, is not placed within the woman, even though
she is a politician and one would expect political feeling to be present. This is a person that
is less political, because there is no space left for her own desire: as voters insist on social
media, they voted for her not for her ability, but because they desired her.  
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How does this fictional psychopathic killer, by definition void of feelings, feel more than
corrupt patriarchal politicians? How does corruption fill democratic “political space” with
the selfish self, in an aimless task of being without other people? How does Killing Eve
subvert the self through desire? How does desire create “political space” in Killing Eve?
Sophia Kanaouti teaches media and politics and gender / social exclusion at the University
of Athens and the University of Crete in Greece. She is a 2018 and a 2022 Fellow of the
Institute for Critical Social Inquiry of The New School for Social Research, New York, and a
2021 Democracy and Diversity Fellow of the same institution. She is finishing a book on the
Structural Elements of Sexism: Women and Politics, and her most recent article is coming
out from Brill in 2023: “A Media Pandemic: Sexualised Right-Wing Politics and Mis-
sublimation"
Tina Kandiashvili, “Something Terrible about Reality”: Environment and Plato’s

Epistemology in Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964)
Environmental films often draw one-sided connections between humans and nature.
Humans are villainized for destroying the ecological future of the planet and hence are
faced with an ethical responsibility to stop violent actions against it. The conflict usually
highlights the idea of physical damage that has been applied to nature, which, in turn, can
cause physical extinction of life on Earth. This perspective has popularized many of the
urgent environmental concerns, yet it limits space for further investigation of the complex
relationship of humans with the environment, including the question of the environment's
effect on spirituality and knowledge. Hence, the present paper aims at drawing connections
between environment, ethics, and epistemology by applying Plato’s Phaedrus to the
analysis of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964). In the dialogue, Plato views ‘beauty’
(kallos) as the primary trigger that enables the ‘soul’ (psūkhḗ) to experience ‘love’ (eros),
allowing it to recall the world of ‘Forms’(eidos) and reach the highest form of knowledge
(noesis). As I will argue, Antonioni represents ‘beauty’ through nature, the damage of which
makes it impossible for ‘soul’ Giuliana (Monica Vitti) to love and thus return to the world of
‘Forms’. As she says: “There’s something terrible about reality”. The aim of this paper is first
of all to introduce Platonic thought to the study of Antonioni’s oeuvre, which, more broadly,
spotlights the relevance of Ancient philosophy to film studies. More importantly, however,
it intends to highlight the importance of film in presenting original approaches to the
environmental question.
Tina Kandiashvili is a second-year PhD student in Film Studies at the University of
Edinburgh researching Søren Kierkegaard’s ethical theory in Lars von Trier’s cinematic
oeuvre. At the same university, Tina has earned an MSc in Film Studies and an MA in
Philosophy and Theology. Currently, Tina is a guest lecturer at the Georgian Institute of
Public Affairs, teaching the postgraduate course: “Political Thought and Cinema”. At the
University of Edinburgh, she is a tutor for the “Introduction to European Cinema” and “Bible
in Literature” courses. Her research interests include the intersections between film and
philosophy and film and religion.
Zahra Khosroshahi, Protest without Borders: The Collective Feminism of Mania

Akbari
The current protests across Iran, with loud chants of woman, life, liberty highlight the
significant role of women in this revolution in the making. Intersectional and transnational
in texture, these protests have really underscored the important role of the Iranian diaspora.
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Most studies of Iranian cinema create a distinction between films made inside and outside
of the country, at times even creating a false binary. In response to the current and ongoing
situation, many artists living in Iran have joined protesters by taking off their compulsory
hijab to speak out against the Islamic Republic, risking not only their careers but their lives
too. Those in the diaspora have displayed an unwavering support, amplifying voices from
within Iran. Exiled Iranian filmmakers and actors such as Golshifteh Farahani, Mania Akbari,
Shirin Neshat, and Shohreh Aghdashlou have joined their fellow compatriots.
Turning to Mania Akbari’s A Moon for My Father (2019) filmed and produced in the United
Kingdom, this talk explores the ways in which the filmmaker engages with borders and
border crossing, as well as the relationship between home and exile, local and global, to
respond to systemic violence. In doing so, Akbari re-writes herself in an act of resistance
and an assertion of belonging. By merging her body with the women of her country, and
her story with theirs, Akbari claims a spot, a place in this ongoing resistance, and even in
her exile, imagines her body as part of Iran’s women’s movement.
Zahra Khosroshahi: I am a Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at University of Glasgow
researching everyday activism and resistance in Iran's contemporary cinema. Currently, I am
working on a forthcoming book Iranian Women Filmmakers: A Cinema of Resistance
(Edinburgh University Press, 2023). I am interested in how the visual medium challenges
systems of power, and how filmmaking specifically functions as a form of resistance in Iran.
My work also considers the role and influence of Iranian cinema on the global stage.
Joanne Knowles, ‘Essential stuff’: TV reviews in Just Seventeen and the

framing of TV for teenage girls
This paper examines TV reviews from the girls’ magazine Just Seventeen between 1983-
1987 drawn from the Femorabilia archive of twentieth-century girls’ and women’s
magazines, held at Liverpool John Moores University, exploring issues raised by archives of
TV reviews and previews for particular audiences. It addresses questions about the
sustainability, ethics and necessity of such archival research on the presumed reception of
TV by young viewers, and the ability of such magazines to embody a different kind of ‘screen
archive’.
Historically girls’ comics and magazines have been undervalued both financially and
culturally (Gibson, 2015) meaning that although they were hugely popular and widely
consumed, their preservation has been precarious. This has the further consequence that
our contemporary critical view of them is strongly shaped by existing research studies such
as Angela McRobbie’s seminal work on Jackie (1978). While research has analysed the ‘code
of pop’ (McRobbie, 1990) in magazines like Jackie, little attention has been paid to these
magazines’ representation of screen media and their framing of how their audience might
engage with popular film and television.
This paper would focus on the archives of Just Seventeen from 1983-1987, in which TV
reviews and previews became a regular feature, and when a period in which teenagers were
being more widely acknowledged as also being television viewers with increasing agency
with regard to family viewing choices, to examine what was offered to its readership as
‘essential stuff’.
Joanne Knowles is a Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture, Communication at Liverpool John
Moores University. She is interested in popular media and culture from the 19th century to
the present day, particularly in relation to gender and narrative. She has published on
seasonality and television in the Journal of Popular Television and for Viewfinder, and her
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latest article, on girls’ magazines, fashion and public space, is forthcoming in Film, Fashion
and Consumption.
Mustafa Kocabinar, Challenging Stereotypes: The Representation of Henry V

in David Michôd’s The King (2019)
This paper examines David Michôd’s The King (2019) in terms of its representation of
masculinity. Previous heroic depictions of Henry V attempted to rouse the patriotic spirits of
British audiences. Thus, Laurance Olivier’s Henry V (1944) offered a morale booster for
British audiences in the second world war, while Kenneth Branagh in Henry V (1989)
depicted the king’s journey from his youth to learning how to be a ‘true’ king for his nation.
Played by Timothée Chalamet, the depiction of Henry V in The King offers a ‘softer’ version
of masculinity, with less emphasis on violence, stoicism, and muscular performance. This
paper seeks to explore the depiction of Henry V in The King in terms of the cultural
barometer charting shifts in discourses of masculinity in the 2010s. Combining textual and
contextual analysis, I explored how the film responds to contemporary Western society
through reworking stories of the past. Drawing on the work of film scholars such as Claire
Monk, James Chapman and Sue Harper, I employ contextual analysis to explore the
representation of Henry V in The King within the context of star studies and historical film
approaches. I also consider the film’s production (e.g. its international cast and crew) and
global distribution on Netflix.
Mustafa Kocabinar: I am a PhD student in Film Studies at the University of Southampton.
My research is based on the representation of British Kings in Cinema. In conjunction with
the purpose of my study, I emphasize the construction of British Kings in terms of the
cultural barometer charting shifts in discourses of masculinity in Western Culture in the
2010s – I specifically focus on Hollywood and British Cinema.
Astrid Korporaal, Material Beings: Decolonial Roleplay in the work of Ana

María Millán and Erika Tan
Screens have long been regarded as portals into other worlds or visions of the future.
Decoloniality asks what the material costs are of creating new worlds and who is given the
power to shape our future. Ariella Azoulay has shown that image-making practices are
intertwined with the imperial rights to destroy existing worlds and to manufacture a new
one. She proposes that we treat archived images and objects as inscriptions of living,
potential worlds. This leaves the question open how we might imaginatively project these
recovered worlds, what the material underpinnings of these projections would be, and how
we deal with the power dynamics of this process. In this paper, I look at the use of roleplay
as a strategy to decolonize and reconnect the process of visualizing potential realities and
the material relationships that sustain these realities. I compare Erika Tan’s The Forgotten
Weaver (2017) and Ana María Millán’s Trescaras (2017-18). In Tan’s work, a weaver brought
to England for the Empire Exhibition (1924) becomes a proxy for the artist, inverting the
convention of the present speaking for the past. In Millán’s work, the Colombian comic
supervillain SnowFlame is reinvented through collaborative motion capture. I argue that in
both works, the screen becomes a medium for divestment from the abstract imagination
that erases existing worlds. The work of making a figure stand in for an entire lifeworld and
reducing a lifeworld to a dehumanized figure is hijacked to reclaim and sustain expanded,
multiply inhabited versions of these worlds.
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Astrid Korporaal is a curator, researcher and writer completing an AHRC-funded PhD at
Kingston University, in partnership with the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Entitled
Peripheral Visions: Reframing the Margins in Film and Film Festival Ecologies, the project is
centered on experimental collaborative practices in contemporary moving image
production and presentation. She also holds an M.A. in Global Arts from Goldsmiths
University in the United Kingdom and a B.A. in Arts, Culture and Media from the University
of Groningen in the Netherlands. Previously, she was Curator of Education Partnerships at
the ICA, Co-Founder and Director of Almanac Projects in London and Turin, and Assistant
Curator of nomadic curatorial collective FormContent, among other roles. She has written
articles for publications such as Art Monthly, Arte e Critica, Performance Paradigm and
NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies.
Richard Langley, Albert, Employablity and the Elephant in the Room

In recent years, ‘employability’ has become a key idea in UK HE, with an increasing emphasis
on universities to help students develop certain skills, attributes and capabilities (which
usually lie beyond the specific remits of their degree programme) to prepare them for the
twenty-first century workplace. Thought of another way, employability concerns preparing
students with an understanding of the ‘rules of the game’. The emphasis, pedagogically, is
on giving students skills and strategies to be able to adapt themselves as ‘players’ – not on
questioning the nature of the game. 
One of the skills we now teach on the MA in Film and TV at the University of Birmingham is
BAFTA’s albert training, which teaches students how to use the Carbon Footprint Calculator,
alongside wider information about climate change in general. The albert initiative has been,
without question, a progressive and necessary change in UK production culture; however,
it omits the elephant in the room. In its aim to be scientific, neutral and apolitical, it
completely ignores the presence of neo-liberalism and late-stage capitalism (and their
obsessions with notions of growth and progress), and the systemic changes required, for
example, to meet UK net zero commitments. The emphasis in the teaching, again, is on the
individuals (as students and as productions) to adapt the way they play the game, rather
than the game itself. It’s time to address the elephant.
Richard Langley is currently Programme Convenor for the MA Film and Television
Production at the University of Birmingham. He did his first degree, in American and
Canadian Studies, and both his MPhil and PhD at University of Birmingham, undertaking the
latter part-time so that he could pursue other interesting career opportunities.
Consequently, Richard has had a broad-based work experience across the culture sector, in
arts centres, museums, television development and video production. As well as his own
experiments in the development of an audio-visual academia, Richard has worked in a
range of freelance roles (camera, edit, production) and across a range of genres (sports,
comedy, drama, current affairs).
Richard Langley, Robert Munro, Muriel Tinel-Temple, Dominic Topp and Ted
Wilkes, ROUNDTABLE: Video Essays as Assessment
This panel on the use of video essays in teaching and assessment within Film and cognate
subjects will consist of short (5mins) presentations from each of the panellists followed by a
roundtable discussion and opportunity for audience participation.
Video essays are becoming a commonplace method of assessment within our discipline(s),
contributing to its sustainability and expansion by supporting student diversity and different
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learning preferences, offering new ways of analysing moving images, building multimedia
skills through 'authentic assessment', and varying assessment types beyond the traditional
essay. We envision this panel as an opportunity to share experiences and best practice, and
to address key issues and challenges arising from this new form of assessment.
We anticipate the following areas to be raised in discussion
• the legitimacy of the video essay form for teaching and assessment
• the balance between critical and creative thinking
• enabling students to engage with audio-visual objects of study in the same medium,
bypassing the ekphrasis of translating them into written or spoken language
• student needs and diversity
• module design: incorporating video essays into existing modules versus
videographic criticism as standalone practice
• teaching the video essay and the flipped classroom
• the value and limitations of assessment rubrics and marking criteria, including
student self-marking and peer review
• legal and ethical considerations: the use of archival and found footage, publishing
student work
• submission processes
• academic integrity
• technical facilities and training necessary for staff and students
Richard Langley is a Lecturer in Film at the University of Birmingham (UK), focused on
audio-visual practice-based teaching and research. He was one of the first people at
Birmingham to graduate with an AV PhD and designed and delivered the university’s first
video essay module in 2015. He also supervises practice-based work at postgraduate level,
including numerous MA dissertations and currently seven AV PhD students, who are
working across a range of filmic forms – including video essays, documentaries,
abstract/experimental and fiction. He also conducts his own experiments in audio-visual
academia.
Robert Munro is Programme Leader for Film and Media at Queen Margaret University. He
completed his PhD in 2018, with a thesis titled 'Screening Scotland's Stories: Film
Adaptations of Scottish Literature in the 21st Century'. His research interests focus around
trans/national cinema, Scottish film and visual culture, film education, videographic criticism
and Film aesthetics. He is an Associate Editor for the Film Education journal.
Muriel Tinel-Temple is Lecturer in Film and Digital Content Creation, University of
Roehampton. She mainly teaches ‘critical practice’, and her research explores experimental
filmmaking, found footage/archive-based films, self-representation, Francophone cinemas
and mediated landscapes. She is the author of Le cinéaste au travail: autoportraits (2016),
co-editor of From Self-Portrait to Selfie: Representing the Self in the Moving Image (2019),
and she recently published ‘Found Footage and the Construction of the Self: Dream English
Kid 1964-1999 AD and Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream’ (Ekphrasis, 2021). She organises
screenings at Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, including ‘Jacques Perconte: Digital
Landscapes’.
Dominic Topp is a Teaching Fellow in Film Studies at the University of Southampton. He
previously taught at the University of Kent and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. His
writing has been published in Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind and
Significação: Revista de Cultura Audiovisual and in the edited collections Mapping Movie
Magazines: Digitization, Periodicals and Cinema History (2020) and Stars, Fan Magazines
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and Audiences: Desire by Design (forthcoming). He has used audiovisual essay as an
assessment method on a variety of modules at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Ted Wilkes is a Screenwriter, Lecturer and Video Essayist from London. He produces work
on his YouTube channel Sight Unsound which covers both theoretical and practical areas of
Film production. Currently, he teaches at UAL: London College of Communications and
Regent’s University, London. His feature screenplay ‘FULFILMENT’ is under option at
ArdimagesUK (GOD’S OWN COUNTRY) and received development funding from The
Uncertain Kingdom which supports projects that interrogate British culture. He also writes
articles on craft and industry intelligence for Screencraft and Arc Studio Pro.
George Larke-Walsh and Elayne Chaplin, The Ethics of True Crime Adaptation:
The Staircase
This paper explores the ‘migration’ of a true crime story, from crime scene, to book, to
documentary and fiction series under the conference topic ‘Ethics’. It uses the term
migration in the fluid sense described by Westerstahl Stenport and Traylor (2015) and Leitch
(2022) wherein content “migrates from, to, and between genre, medium and device”
(Westerstahl Stenport and Traylor: 75) and considers this process in respect of the ethics of
adaptation specifically between documentary and fiction.
If we consider the adaptations of The Staircase as repositories of interconnected and
competing information about events, is there any point in discussing their ethics and the
presentation of truths, or is the purpose of such adaptations to simply “add new properties
to a social artefact” (90). Do they “encourage members of their audience to return, more
richly informed” (Leitch:5), or do they cancel each other out?
The texts discussed have a symbiotic relationship in that they all engage with an ‘original’
event that is ill-defined at best. Arguably, the appeal of these texts is that, while the definitive
truth remains elusive, each text offers moments, glances, gestures or comments that tease
audiences towards a solution. The ethics of these moments, or ‘hint’ markers if you will, are
specific to each format and this paper explores their use and affect in practice.
George S. Larke-Walsh is a faculty member in Arts and Creative Industries at the University
of Sunderland, UK. She began her academic career in the north east area of the UK, but
then moved to the USA, teaching at the University of North Texas from 2004 to 2020. Her
scholarly interests focus on non-fiction and fiction film theories. Her publishing history
includes books and articles on ethics in true crime, as well as the presentation of
mythologies, and masculine identities in narratives about the mafia.
Elayne Chaplin is a staff tutor at the Open University, UK. Her research interests include
the horror genre, in particular the relationship between history, political ideology, and the
depictions of monstrousness in film; East Asian cinema including the work of Kitano Takeshi;
and more broadly focused on sociohistorical formulations of gendered identity in cinema.
Dominic Lash, "Privacy, consent, and expression in Ildikó Enyedi's On Body and
Soul (Testről és lélekről, 2017)"
Ildikó Enyedi's On Body and Soul centres on the developing relationship between two
employees of a Hungarian slaughterhouse: the new young quality inspector Mária
(Alexandra Borbély) and the older financial officer Endre (Géza Morcsányi). Both characters
are seen by others as somehow "defective", Endre thanks to his paralysed left arm and Mária
because of her autism spectrum disorder. Lilla Tőke has recently written that, despite
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promising to do something else, the film ends up operating within "a framework that is as
gendered as it is ableist". This paper will argue that Tőke acutely pinpoints some
problematic aspects of the film, but that she also underestimates the complexity of its
relationship to its subject. I will claim that the film resonates with the philosopher Stanley
Cavell's reflections on the notions of privacy, consent, and expression, while also suggesting
some of their limitations. Cavell draws on Wittgenstein's notion of expression, according to
which we do not infer somebody's emotions from their facial expressions, but rather see
their emotions in their expressions. I will argue both that something similar can be said
about our relationship as viewers towards filmic expression, and that autistic experience
profoundly challenges claims of the universality of such accounts, because people with
autism spectrum disorder characteristically do make inferences from facial expressions or
other bodily gestures. In both its narrative and its form, then, On Body and Soul vividly
dramatizes urgent questions about the ways our understanding of films reflects, and might
inform, our understanding of one another.
Dominic Lash is Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Bristol. His first
monograph, The Cinema of Disorientation: Inviting Confusions, was published in 2020 by
Edinburgh University Press and his second, Robert Pippin and Film: Ethics, Politics, and
Psychology after Modernism by Bloomsbury Academic in 2022. He has published in journals
including Screen, Movie, Film-Philosophy, and Open Screens, and taught at the universities
of Oxford and Reading, as well as at King's College London, University College London, and
Anglia Ruskin University. He is currently writing a BFI Film Classics volume on Kiyoshi
Kurosawa's Cure (1997).
Giulia Lavarone, The Sustainability of Film-Induced Tourism: Remarks on Italian

Case Studies
Film-induced tourism, i.e. “visitation to sites where movies and TV programmes have been
filmed as well as (…) tours to production studios, included film-related theme parks”
(Beeton, 2005), has attracted the interest of public and private bodies operating
throughout the world in the tourist and in the audiovisual sector over the last twenty years.
These phenomena have been broadly discussed by academic research within several
disciplinary fields, from tourism management to cultural geography and urban
anthropology, as well as by media and fan studies.
The concept of sustainability, explicitly addressed in the most recent contributions on film-
induced tourism (e.g.: Tzanelli, 2020; Lundberg and Lindström, 2020; and many others), has
been strongly evoked since the early studies in this field, such as Beeton’s (2005), Tzanelli’s
(2007) or, in the Italian context, Provenzano’s (2007).
This paper will briefly recall the different meanings of economic, environmental and social
sustainability emerging from the international literature on film-induced tourism. Selected
Italian case studies will be subsequently discussed in the light of these concepts, with a
particular focus on the phenomena of overtourism associated to the TV series Un passo dal
cielo (2011-) at Lake Braies.
Giulia Lavarone is a research fellow in Film Studies at the University of Padova (Italy), where
she participates to the CineLands research projects, devoted to the relationship between
media, landscape and tourism. She has authored scholarly articles and chapters in edited
books, as well as the two monographs Cinema, media e turismo (PUP, 2016) and Parigi ci
appartiene? (PUP, 2022). Among her recent contributions, the chapters in the books The
Routledge Companion to Media and Tourism (edited by M. Månsson et al., Routledge, 2021)
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and Audiovisual Tourism Promotion (edited by A. Leotta and D. Bonelli, Palgrave Macmillan,
2021).
Ming-Yu Lee Essay Film-making in the Age of Anxiety: Letter-Film as a Way of

Resistance and Regaining Utopia
During the world pandemic of Covid-19, the Japanese filmmaker Yuri Obitani and I finished
a filmed correspondence, Correspondence: Yuri Obitani/Ming-Yu Lee. In this paper, I aim to
discuss the following issues: first, how current world situations including war between
Russian and Ukraine and Covid-19 pandemic have profoundly changed the landscape of
independent filmmaking in both form and content. Independent filmmakers now adjust
their ways of filmmaking to a relatively more personal (diary film) or collective, collaborative
way (letter-film). Secondly, how anxieties of the uncertain future, such as anxiously waiting
for responses, being eager to be heard or understood, and to be misunderstood, have
become a permanent and lingering motif in the letter-film? And how do we understand and
express this anxiety in our Correspondence? And third, in Correspondence, how the use of
language (Japanese and Chinese), or avoiding using them, has become a narrative strategy
in the process of production as a symbol of resistance to a language barrier. Béla Balázs’
once described cinema as “the first international language.” In Correspondence, Yuri
Obitani and I have also tried to reestablish this tower of Babel, as a way of regaining the
Utopia of cinematic language.
Ming-Yu Lee is Assistant Professor of Radio, Television and Film at Shih Hsin University,
Taipei, Taiwan. He is the author and editor of Paysages du contresens (2010) and The Diary
Film and Subjectivity of the Self: Taiwan-New York – Paris (2016), and Crossing Cinema: the
Diary Film, the Essay Film, and the Voice of I (2022). He is an independent filmmaker, his film
works were selected and won awards in international film festivals and museums, including
Liverpool Underground Film Festival (The Underground Award), Lausanne Underground
Film and Music Festival, VIDEOFORMES, Festival Tous Courts, Taiwan Biennial, and Jeu de
Paume. He is also the curator of EX!T 7 – Filming in the Moment: the Diary Film Festival, EX!T
11 – Film Letter: Counterpoint and Echo, and EX!T 12 – My Own
Private Mekas (cocurator).
Nikki J.Y. Lee, An Ecocritical Approach to Discourses on the Korean Film

Industry: A Preliminary Exploration of the Environmental Turn
In this paper, I propose to examine discourses on the contemporary South Korean film
industry from an ecocritical perspective. Within the limitations of a preliminary exploration
of fast-moving contemporary events, the paper provides an overview of the ecological
ramifications of the ‘anthropocene’ Korean film industry and conceives alternative new
paradigms to imagine its future. In the face of the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic,
and as part of the Green New Deal (the South Korean government’s new economic scheme),
the Ministry of Science and ICT announced a policy in 2020 to develop the digital media
ecology with an emphasis on ‘fairness’ and ‘sustainability’ (Cine 21, 2020. 6. 26). This sub-
scheme will shape the transition - and recovery in coming years - of the Korean film industry
from its current deep crisis, caused during the pandemic. In these circumstances, the
industry’s environmental turn appears to be an imperative. In tandem with it, the
fundamental premise of the industry is also due to be altered.
In engaging such crucial momentum, I intend to critically analyze discourses on the
development of the Korean film industry since 2016 when the Paris Agreement on
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greenhouse-gas-emissions was signed. Principal materials to be consulted include relevant
academic research on the industry, including papers commissioned and published by the
Korean Film Council, as these key sources provide important data and frameworks, not only
for the government’s agenda-setting, but also for Korean and English language scholarly
approaches to the industry. I will investigate research concerned with the industry’s growth;
and its fairness and sustainability from the vantage point of ‘intersectionality’ while drawing
upon T. J. Demos’ emphasis: “The ‘intersectionality’ insists on the inseparability between
environmental matters of concern and sociopolitical and economic frameworks of
in/justice.” (Demos 2019)
Nikki J. Y. Lee is Senior Lecturer in Asian Media at Nottingham Trent University, UK. She has
published various articles and book chapters on the globalization of the Korean film
industry, inter-Asian film co-production, Korean film directors and stars, and the sound
works of Live Tone, South Korean film sound studio. Her recent chapter on Ryu Seung-wan’s
Die Bad was published in Rediscovering Korean Cinema (Michigan University Press, 2019);
and she co-wrote a chapter on Heo Young, film director of the Japanese colonial period,
which was published in Theorizing Colonial Cinema: Reframing Production, Circulation and
Consumption of Film in Asia (Indiana University Press, 2022). She is currently working on
contemporary Korean blockbusters; and Sino-Korean filmmaking collaboration.
Maruša Levstek, Green Planet: XR to Change Minds About Our Planet

As immersive experiences, such as augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR), are
becoming more and more popular, it is important to understand their impact on our society.
The impact of media on public opinion is well documented (e.g. Kosho, 2016), however,
emerging immersive media is less understood (Spangenberger et al., 2022).
This session focuses on research conducted with The BBC Earth & Factory 42 Green Planet
Augmented Reality Experience, investigating its impact on visitors’ sustainability-related
values and behaviours. Visitors were invited to complete a short exit survey at the
experience venue. The survey measured their sustainability knowledge, attitudes, and
behaviours before and after attending the experience. Visitors' preference for conservation
of species featured in the experience was also investigated. Survey participants were
approached to participate in a follow-up survey a month later. Additionally, twenty
participants were randomly selected to take part in an individual in-depth interview.
Our results suggest that attending The Green Planet Augmented Reality Experience can
have a positive impact on one’s sustainability attitudes and behaviours. However, the
interviews revealed a self-selection bias as most visitors were Green Planet and Sir David
Attenborough fans. Therefore, many visitors were already highly educated on the issues
around sustainability. Potential of immersive experiences in social change will be discussed.
Maruša Levstek is an XR Audience Researcher at StoryFutures, Royal Holloway, University
of London. Maruša has an inter-disciplinary background in psychology, sociology, and
anthropology, which she implements in researching the role of immersive experiences in
social change. Maruša worked with a range of augmented, mixed, and virtual reality
projects, notably the Factory42-BBC Green Planet AR Experience, The National Gallery’s
The Keeper of Paintings app, and the StoryTrails project with the BFI, Niantic, and the BBC.
Maggie Xiaoge Li, Rebuilding Lost Memory in Digital Games

Along the River During the Qingming Festival is an important artwork in Chinese art history
that captures people’s daily life and landscapes in the capital city during the Northern Song
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periods (960-1127).1 In this paper, I will analyse how this Chinese painting has been
represented in digital games, and how the memories that have been captured in this
painting become ‘experienceable’ to game players. Ni Shui Han (NetEase, 2018) is a
multiplayer online role-playing game on the PC platform, the game scenes directly change
this painting from a static scene to a dynamic space. The game player plays a character who
lives in this space and has been ‘implanted’ with memories of this world. Therefore, the
memories recorded in this painting are not only can be observed but also can be
experienced by players. The virtual reality in the game is no longer only restore ‘reality’ from
the painting, it builds a memory that connects the player with the bygone era through the
interactions between the player and their character, this world is meant to appear ‘real’ and
draw the player in and increase the sense of presence.
Maggie Li is a lecturer in Game Theory at the University for the Creative Arts. She
completed her PhD from the University of Southampton, her research focuses on game
studies and game culture in China. As Visiting Lecturer she taught on MA Global Media
Management in 2021 and has worked as Teaching Assistant for a range of modules in the
Film Department. She has been involved in the organisation of several conferences,
including the 9th Annual BAFTSS Conference. She has publications on digital games and
Chinese game culture, and has forthcoming publications on game sound and music.
Yuan Li, Man in Love, Woman in Activism: Gender, Politics, and Linguistic
Relativity in New Taiwanese Melodrama
On the poster of Man in Love (2021), one slogan reads, ‘the most heart-rending new
Taiwanese romantic melodrama’. Adapted from a Korean film of the same title, Man in Love
is transplanted to a Taiwanese-Hokkien speaking context which is located in northern
Taiwan. This paper states Man in Love as a part of the new Taiwanese-language cinema and
emphasises the bilingual representation of the characters, diverging from the great
linguistic and aesthetic divisions between the Mandarin films and Taiwanese language
cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. In this paper, I emphasise the Taiwanese Hokkien and
Taiwanese Mandarin in this film are encoded against a gendered background. By using Han
Byung-Chul’s The Agony of Eros, this paper analyses how love and romance is pronounced
and visually presented by the heroine by crossing the linguistic borders, yet deconstructed
by the hero in this film. With the analysis of the code-switching among Taiwanese Hokkien,
Taiwanese Mandarin, as well as the farting sound depicted in Man in Love, I argue that the
sexuality reflected in the deconstructed ‘new romance’ echoes the anxiety embodied in the
previous Taiwanese language cinema. However, unlike the ‘vernacular modernism’ in those
films, which has been revealed in Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley’s paper, the new Taiwanese
language melodrama captures the self-negotiation of the anxious individuals living in a
global discourse of capitalism and consumerism.
Yuan Li is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Southampton, UK. With the
continuous concern for authorship in Taiwan New Cinema, she received her Bachelor’s
degree in Film and Television Studies from Beijing Normal University in 2016 and Master’s
degree in Film Studies from the University of Southampton in 2017. Her current research
interests include transnational Taiwan cinema and languages in Taiwan films.
Bjarke Liboriussen , The unintended procedural argument for transactional

climate change leadership in Civilization VI: Gathering Storm
The videogame Civilization is an alternative history simulation spanning the period from
4,000 BC to the present day. The latest iteration of the game, Sid Meier’s Civilization VI:
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Gathering Storm (Firaxis Games, 2019) includes an ecological dimension by simulating the
causal connections between human civilization and global warming.
Civilization employs what Ian Bogost (2007) calls procedural rhetoric. Classic Aristotelian
and written rhetoric persuade through argument, visual rhetoric through images, and
“procedural rhetoric is the practice of persuading through processes in general and
computational processes in particular” (Bogost, 2007, p. 3). For example, the process
whereby coal power plants contribute to climate change is in Civilization represented as a
process, an interactive simulation, not just through texts and images.
The perspective of procedural rhetoric is a useful addition to ecocriticism, but the case of
Civilization illustrates how procedural rhetoric might inadvertently argue for a particular
type of leadership, namely, transactional leadership (that is, management). The interactivity
of videogames entails an active subject position that is often enacted as a commander (who
handles critical problems) or a manager (who handles known problems), but rarely as a
leader (who handles wicked problems; see Grint, 2010, pp. 12–21 on leadership). Support
for a leader’s handling of the “super wicked problem” (Morton qtd. in Bruhn & Gjelsvik,
2018, p. 120) of global warming, which might include drastic lifestyle changes, requires
more than calculative compliance based on maximization of self-interest but also a shared
understanding of “the common good” (Etzioni, 2018, p. 97).
Bjarke Liboriussen is Associate Professor in Digital and Creative Media at the University of
Nottingham Ningbo China’s School of International Communications. His most recent
publications were on the interplay of identity, performance and technologies in creative
work and on videogames as popular heritage. Inspired by the film-philosophy of Jacques
Rancière, his ongoing research focuses on the connections between cinema and
videogames.
Tim Lindemann , ‘History Isn’t Here Yet‘ – Landscape, Entanglement, and the
Nation in First Cow and Meek’s Cutoff
This paper examines Kelly Reichardt’s historical Westerns Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and First
Cow (2019) in terms of their cinematic landscape and responds to the call for an exploration
of environmental, democratic, ethical, social, and economic futures in film. It will be argued
that the two films fall in line with a recent trend in US indie cinema which approaches
marginal rural landscapes from an embodied, interactive perspective of sustainability and
care. Reichardt’s two Westerns, both set in the early- to mid-19th century, apply this
approach to the ideologically charged terrain of the supposed ‘wilderness’ of the early
United States and the process of its imperialist consolidation.
An ethical approach to landscape is foregrounded in both films: firstly, in relation to its
emergence through dwelling and bodily interactivity between a community and its
respective environment and, secondly, in terms of its significance for the creation of the
United States as a nation state. Therefore, this paper suggests a theoretical approach that is
based around close analyses of landscape representation as well as on the writings of
geographer Kenneth Olwig. Olwig tracks the meaning of landscape in the West from a
social, communal concept based on custom and community to a scenic, disembodied
image used in the consolidation of nation states – the Western film is a key example for the
latter in the US context. This paper will thus highlight how Reichardt’s two films subvert the
scenic landscape tropes of the classical Western to critically reframe US history from the
embodied perspective of the oppressed and marginalised. By rethinking the past from
subaltern perspectives, the films invite reflections about more cooperative, ethical futures
and environments.
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Tim Lindemann is an early career researcher and teaching assistant at Queen Mary
University of London. He has previously worked as a research assistant at Deutsche
Kinemathek, Berlin, and as a curator for Interfilm short film festival. His recently passed Ph.D.
thesis analyses depictions of landscape and rural poverty in US indie films.
Xi Liu, Slow living: re-editing space and time in short videos

This paper will explore the cottagecore aesthetics of slow living in the famous Chinese
Youtubers Li Ziqi and Dianxi Xiaoge’s short videos which showcase ideal everyday life in
Chinese villages. The idea of slow living involves ecological and sustainable attitudes
toward the pace of contemporary life and the conscious negation of different temporalities
which make up everyday lives. Aligning with the key themes of this panel - ecoaesthetics, I
will examine how the short videos present human-nature unity in their control of time and
space in video-making. This paper includes two sections. I will first compare the images of
‘slowness’ in films and short videos and show the new understandings of ‘stillness’ and
‘slowness’ in short video editing. The key questions are, in the editing process, what subjects
are speeded up and what subjects are slowed down, and why they do so. Secondly, I will
examine the representations of ‘care’ and ‘attention’ which are maintained between
humans, non-human animals, and nature in the videos. I want to explore how care and
attention, as the practices of slow living in everyday life, build a sustainable lifestyle.
Xi Liu is a teaching associate in the School of East Asian Studies at the University of
Sheffield. Her studies focus on Chinese film aesthetics and affect theory and conduct a
dialogue between Deleuzian philosophy and Chinese film studies, discussing the
construction of space and time both in and beyond the film world. She recently published
a book chapter ‘Spatial perception: aesthetics of yijing in transnational kung fu films’ in the
book Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization.
Tom Livingstone, Rigged for Scalability: Game Engines and Sustainable

Futures
This paper will examine the recent cycle of capitalisation and R&D driven by game engine
adoption. Taking Aleena Chia’s insight that game engines are “rigged for scalability” I will
ask whether game engines’ emergent ubiquity across multiple areas of visual culture, from
animation to XR, is compatible with the sustainable futures of screen storytelling.
The paper will focus on the game engine driven process of Virtual Production, where VFX
are rendered in real-time within an LED volume. The process has been used widely in some
high-profile productions and has been celebrated as ecologically beneficial. However, I will
suggest that paying attention to the aesthetic characteristics of Virtual Production as they
escalate and proliferate provides a means of identifying and critiquing potentially
unsustainable processes of intensification within game engine use as they are driven by
blockbuster productions.
Scholarly work such as Chia’s (and others) suggests that the proliferation of game engines
is underpinned by a logic of platformization. I will assess the dominant framing of game
engine use as financially and ecologically beneficial against this logic. As will be evidenced
in my analysis of Virtual Production, an engine’s drive for scalability can “lock in” a set of
industrial and aesthetic practices that are in tension with prevailing understandings of
sustainable futures. The affordances of game engine technology are many, and they will be
vital components of the moving image’s sustainable future. But these affordances must be
weighed against the technical defaults and rigging of the engines themselves.
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Tom Livingstone is a Research Fellow at The University of the West of England (UWE)
working within MyWorld, a creative R&D programme driving industry expansion and
innovation in the south-west of England. His research focuses on emergent media with a
particular interest in the impact of game engines on visual culture. He has published widely
on film and digital media and his first book Hybrid Images and the Vanishing Point of Digital
Visual Effects will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2024.
Dario Lolli, Capturing Water: Shinkai Makoto’s Weathering with You and the
digital aesthetics of ‘atmospheric’ animation
Shinkai Makoto’s animated feature Weathering with You (Tenki no ko, 2019) is a coming-of-
age adventure set in a Tokyo affected by a severe climate catastrophe. This subject matter –
reinforced by its open reference to climate change and the spiritual elements of its drama
– easily calls for readings based on ethics and sustainable forms of co-existence. Such
ecocritical readings, however, have remained primarily focused on narrative and
storytelling, to the point of completely displacing the film’s aesthetic form (e.g., Yoneyama,
2020), including animation’s specificity of embodying the environmental themes that it
purportedly represents. As the work of a digital ‘native’ director, this film exemplifies and
popularises a series of aesthetics innovations that, while increasingly common in anime,
have not yet been analysed in terms of their ecocritical potential.
To fill this gap, this paper focuses on the different ways the film tries to ‘capture’ water, on
the screen and beyond. In Weathering with You, Shinkai’s expressive style takes on an
atmospheric quality in which rain and water effects emerge as more than mere decorative
elements. Through digital effects that modify surfaces and simulate light refraction, they
punctuate emotional responses to the very atmospheric variations that propel the narrative.
What are the ethical implications of this ‘atmospheric’ animation? What if this aesthetic
becomes an instrument to advertise and sell numerous commodities, including bottled
water, water ‘captured’ through a licensing deal? I will argue that, if we are to make sense of
this ethical paradox, it is to the potential of animated water that we need to turn.
Dario Lolli is Assistant Professor in Japanese and Visual Culture at Durham University, UK.
His in-progress monograph, titled Dispositives of Extension, investigates the ecologies of
affect, creativity and value established by anime franchises as they move across territories,
media, and contexts of use. His recent research projects, respectively funded by the Japan
Foundation and the Daiwa Foundation, have examined the morphology of the Japanese
licensing sector and the archiving and preservation of anime intermediate materials. His
work has been published by Convergence, Animated Movements and Media Culture &
Society, amongst others.
Katerina Loukopoulou, The United Nations’ Cinematic Worldmaking of a

Sustainable future: the Case of Power Among Men (1959)
The United Nations (UN) set up its film department as soon as it was established in 1945 in
San Francisco. But, it was mainly during the late 1950s, when accomplished filmmaker
Thorold Dickinson headed the UN’s Film Service, that its productions firmly moved from
informationals into creative documentary narratives, galvanising cinema’s worldmaking
powers to project the world to the world. Amongst the films that Dickinson produced, Power
Among Men (1959) stands out as the first UN feature-length film with global distribution.
The film’s voice-over narration, poignantly delivered by film star of the time Laurence
Harvey, revolves around the motif of “men build, men destroy”. The universalist tone
permeating the narrative aims to unify the film’s four parts, each one dedicated to an
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episode of materialist reconstruction in four very different geographical and socio-
economic contexts (Italy, Haiti, Canada, Norway). It does so by foregrounding the
constructive and destructive powers of the four elements of fire, earth, water and air,
culminating into one of the earliest cinematic visions of sustainable development. This
paper aims to foreground this little-known film’s significance for its creative articulation of
UN’s proto-environmental politics and of what we now call 'sustainable futures'. I will do so
by mobilising the notion of ‘worldmaking’ (Nelson Goodman, 1978) and by drawing on
research in the UN archives, funded by a British Academy Small Research Grant on
documentary peace cinema. My paper offers a contextual and textual analysis of a film that
deserves unearthing and critical re-appraisal for its prescient adaptation of sustainable
discourses into screen narratives.
Katerina Loukopoulou is a film historian and Senior Academic Developer at Middlesex
University London. Her current research interests include peace cinema and embedding
research on climate change and sustainable development into the HE curriculum. Her peer-
reviewed publications include journal articles in Film History; and in Visual Culture in Britain;
and essays in the collections: Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United
States (2012); Cinema's Military Industrial Complex (2018); Global Humanitarianism and
Media Culture (2019).
Rayna Lountzis, Mental Health On/Off Set: Fostering inclusive working

practices in the Film and TV Industry - a British Academy Innovation Fellowship
analysis
This paper examines the ongoing research undertaken as part of a two-year British
Academy Innovation Fellowship which is aimed at advancing the position of those with
mental health problems and/or disabilities, paying special attention in this instance to PTSD.
We have already contributed to two films as part of this project, employing people who are
disabled, including ex-service men. Part of this project includes advancing the position of
those often marginalised. According to recent British data, only two percent of those
employed in the film and TV industries have a disability, but for the wider workforce it is 20
percent. A large survey of over 5,000 workers in the industry found nine out of 10 people
suffered from mental health issues, including suicidal thoughts. By combining theoretical
work drawn from theorists such as Deleuze and Bergson on time and memory relating to
PTSD, with specific textual analysis, plus work from industry consultations including
interviews with a variety of filmmakers, this three-way approach attempts to produce
innovative results that will be relevant. This work outlines what the current position is in the
industry in terms of employment in this context, the challenges, and what changes are and
should be taking place to foster a more inclusive and caring workplace. 
Rayna Lountzis is a multilingual entrepreneur and a power vibe transformational coach
who works with individuals and groups, supporting them to reach their highest potential
and bring their heart-desired projects to life. Being an advocate for unity and oneness has
drawn her to projects where she can make a difference through positive impact and
inclusion. Rayna is a third-year doctoral degree student in Film Studies, creating a novel film
movement ‘Situational Film’ as part of her thesis.
Xi Lu, The War Film and Existentialism: All Quiet on the Western Front
In the recent war film All Quiet on the Western Front (Edward Berger, 2022), a chaotic and
absurd world is vividly represented to remind spectators of the brutality of war and the
fragility of human life. Apart from depictions of the WWI battleground, All Quiet on the
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Western Front also presents considerations of the meaning of life, freedom, death and
choice, themes central to Existentialism. I will argue that Jean-Paul Sartre’s basic tenet of
Existentialism – “existence precedes essence” - informs the film as a while and that soldiers’
individual lives are described as nothing important during wartime. They seem to be
reduced to what, Simone du Beauvoir in The Blood of Others (1945), calls the cogs whose
essence is predetermined. The film clearly shows that the soldiers are treated as tools of
war and as a mass collective without individual differences. The soldiers can be easily
replaced by one another and each soldier is an “in-itself” rather than a “for-itself”. I will show
that Existentialism has a close connection with war as well as war films. During the two World
Wars millions of human beings were deprived of their lives and freedom, which we may
suppose prompted the existentialists to initiate a new philosophy to bring people’s
attention back to individual existence, choice and freedom. I will argue that the war film
genre in general resonates directly and indirectly with Existentialist themes.
Xi Lu is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh working on the relationship between
the war film genre and Existentialism.
Virginia Luzón-Aguado, Not Playing Nero’s Fiddle: Finding Hope in Recent

Ecocritical Films
Recently, it has become increasingly difficult to locate ecocritical films that project hope.
Dramas such as Deepwater Horizon (Peter Berg, 2016) or satires such as Don’t Look Up
(Adam McKay, 2021) portray scenarios in which the overly optimistic Neoliberal reliance on
technological fixes and the permanent failure of political leaders to grab the bull by the
horns foster rampant individualism and the dissemination of misinformation about the
environmental crisis. While these grim portrayals may stir an environmental conscience in
some spectators, they can also be considered to be pernicious as they can also lead to
hopelessness and inaction. In other words, all has been lost and since there is nothing left
to do, we might as well keep on enjoying life as we know it, ultimately digging our own
grave. As Fiala (2010: 51) says, “we are in the midst of a crisis of millennial proportions and
yet we waste time and pursue our own self-interests, fiddling while Rome burns.”
Fortunately, one may still locate certain films which stubbornly refuse to fit this pattern. The
Olive Tree (2016, Icíar Bollain, script Paul Laverty), My Octopus Teacher (2020, Pippa Ehrlich,
James Reed) and Wolfwalkers (2020, Tomm Moore) all insist on the possibility of a hopeful
future through their portrayal of human relations to other elements of the biotic community.
It is only by reconfiguring our relationships to other living things and redefining our role in
the ecosystems we inhabit, that the environmental crisis might be mitigated, even if not
altogether averted.
Virginia Luzón-Aguado is a permanent lecturer at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. Her
research interests are wide and has published work on Hollywood film genre, masculinity,
stardom and different forms of ecomedia in different journals and anthologies. Her most
recent publications include a monograph on Harrison Ford (Bloomsbury, 2020) and the
book chapter “Turning over a New Leaf: Exploring Human-Tree Relationships in The Lorax
and Avatar” (Bloomsbury, 2022). Her current work focuses on transnationalism and
environmental issues in cinema, particularly critical plant studies, biophilia and the
representation of landscape in Spanish and US film.
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Carla MacKinnon, Exchange of capital in short animated documentary
production
This paper discusses ways in which economic and symbolic capital is exchanged in the
production of short animated documentary films. Drawing on my quantitative and
qualitative research into contemporary production culture, I will show that short animated
documentaries emerge from a production ecosystem in which free labour and personal
financial contributions by filmmakers often subsidise production credited to high profile
funders, broadcasters and financiers.
A study that I recently conducted analysing the production contexts of 105 short UK
animated documentary films programmed in leading festivals between 2015 and 2020
shows that 30% of the shorts were fully or partially self-funded. Films that were partially self-
funded included films that also received public funding, funding from trusts, charities and
foundations, funding from companies and brands, funding from broadcasters, and funding
from online publications.
This paper presents three case studies of films included in the study, including interviews
with multiple crew members, funders and commissioners. Through these examples I will
show how economic capital provided by a funder or financier is often a relatively small part
of the overall capital, including social and cultural capital, at play in the production of short
film. In-kind labour and resources, and financial top-ups by producers and directors, are
commonly used to get films ‘over the line’, but often go uncredited and are therefore
invisible. This allows the perpetuation of a funding culture which chronically underfunds
short films, potentially prohibiting entry for those with less access to economic or symbolic
capital.
Carla MacKinnon is an animator and researcher, and a tutor in animation at Royal College
of Art. She has a PhD from Arts University Bournemouth, for a thesis on Animated
Documentary. Her animated shorts and installations have been exhibited at galleries and
festivals worldwide. She has also worked as a film festival producer and programmer, as
well as a producer of live action and animated short films.
Vangelis Makriyannakis , The ethics of non self being in Alexandr Askoldov’s

Commissar (1967)
This paper will address the ethics associated with the struggle between the notions of the
civic and the familial as shown in the Soviet film Commissar (1967) by Alexandr Askoldov.
Looking at the film as an example of a modern reversal of the Myth of Antigone this paper
will address the ethics of abandoning the law of the familial in favour of the civic and how
this abandonment is not the result of extra cinematic state censorship and propaganda but
of subjective choice which functions according to the ethics of what philosopher Keti
Chukhrov has described as ‘non-self being’.
In the film we see a mother abandoning her new-born baby to a family of Jews and joining
her comrades at the front, never to return. This paper will focus on this act, easily dismissible
as a sacrificial trope of Soviet war films imposed by state propaganda, to discuss the ethics
associated with abandoning one’s child in favour of the collective (condemnable and often
perceived as demonic across liberal societies) as the result of a subjectivity which functions
under the realm of the idea. I will argue that this idea does not identify with the State, which
in fact had the film shelved for more than thirty years, but rather with an idea of humanism
as ‘need for the other’. This non-anthropocentric humanism is based not on a common and
ahistorical human trope that shapes it but rather on a lack that is constantly in need of
completion.
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Vangelis Makriyannakis is an independent film scholar and theatre director based in
Edinburgh. He holds a PhD in Film Studies from the University of Edinburgh where he
worked as tutor for the ‘Short Courses’ and the Undergraduate Film Studies programmes
for the period 2004 -2014. His work has been published in international peer reviewed
journals, he has delivered seminars and masterclasses in various institutions in Scotland and
in Greece and he has been co-curator for the annual Greek Film Festival in Edinburgh for
the period 2001 -2010. His research interests lie in the areas of politics and film, film
aesthetics and Greek Cinema. His PhD thesis was on the films of Theo Angelopoulos.
Dan Martin, ‘It’s about…just finding a way to survive’: Northern Masculinity,

Seriality, and (Re) Imaginations of Working-Class Futures in Sky’s Brassic (2019
-)
In British culture, the North of England is often constructed as a place of lost futures. Across
different periods of its representation, the Northern place-myth is associated with a fatalistic
set of discourses that cohere around the ‘master-narrative’ of once rich working-class
communities whose political agency is inexorably eroded by post-industrial decline
(Mazierska, 2018). For Paul Dave (2018), the North’s ‘long association with failure’ is
expressive of a wider failure in the history of proletariat destiny; a breakdown, even, in the
possibility of working-class futurity. Within this fatalistic master-narrative, representations of
the North dominantly inscribe a singular spatialising and gendered image of post-industrial
decline. What is often mourned is a future in which masculine agency – grounded in the
imagery of physically extensive labour – can no longer be imagined as the route to social
progress (Thornham, 2016; 2019).
By contrast, this paper contributes to a growing recognition of a progressive political
potential in contemporary filmic and televisual representations of the North, which utilise
complex constructions of space-time to refute masculinist fatalism and, instead, open up
new articulations of classed history (ibid.; Forrest, 2020). My particular interest is in the
textual politics offered in the recent Lancashire-set serial drama Brassic. Television seriality,
in its negotiations of narrative continuity and interruption, raises formal questions around
what long-term sustainable future means and the kinds of actions which might realise it.
Employing close textual analysis, this paper demonstrates how Brassic appropriates seriality
to comment on the ideological contradictions within “lost” notions of working-class male
agency. I argue that the series both offers an example of how Northern masculinity might
be recuperated from fatalistic narratives of lost futures, and justifies why such a recuperation
is important if we are to hold a ’genuine openness to the future’ (Massey, 2005) when
imagining the North of England.
Dan Martin is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Huddersfield currently
working on a project which investigates how the social and cultural values of public service
media are affected by ongoing platformisation. He recently completed his doctoral thesis,
entitled ‘The Representation of the Northern Male Body in British Film and Television’, and
has a continuing interest in issues of working-class representation, masculinity, and the
negotiation of national and regional identity in British visual cultural. Outside of academia,
Dan is an avid home cook and Liverpool fan.
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Phil Mathews, Decolonising curriculums and enabling transnational
approaches across postgraduate media production courses 
This paper will discuss the theoretical and practical steps taken to facilitate and enable a
postgraduate taught framework of six interconnected postgraduate media production
courses to address diversity, inclusivity, sustainability and decolonisation of the curriculum.  
I lead a postgraduate framework of six interconnected courses at Bournemouth University
with over one hundred students from diverse backgrounds comprising, MA Producing, MA
Scriptwriting, MA Sound Design, MA Directing, MA Postproduction Editing and MA
Cinematography.  these courses are autonomous in terms of assessments however they are
dependent on each other to collaborate, develop and produce film content. My role as
framework leader is to ensure that community, cohesion and collaboration is developed
and maintained through the year in a culture of inclusivity, and supportive of diversity in
terms of contexts, theories, guests and exemplars.  This paper will discuss the present
approaches the teaching team have taken from interventions, student feedback, teaching
materials and theoretical and philosophical underpinning, such as the Ubuntu approach to
collaboration through to embedding diversity within the intended learning outcomes of the
unit specs and then into the unit briefs themselves. International Industrial contexts are
supported, and practices are student oriented and not fixated on colonialised approaches
of the global north.  
The paper will outline the wide range of steps taken thus far and identify areas of success
and areas in need of further development and support.  
Phil Mathews is postgraduate framework leader and deputy head of department for media
production at Bournemouth University. Mathews gained his practice-based doctorate in
screenwriting in 2018 and prior to this wrote for film and television, and co-wrote the BAFTA
nominated short ‘Soft’, 2006. Mathews’ research interests cover decolonisation, creative
collaboration, romance genre, screenwriting practice and theory. Recent conference papers
include: Motivation and character arcs. A truly global approach or the pervasiveness of a
western narrative hegemony? SRN 2022.  Decolonising production practices, NAHEMI
2022.  
Catriona McAvoy, Confronting “Institutional Whiteness” in Research and

Practice: Ethics, Responsibility and Solidarity
In film studies there is a promising new movement to discuss ‘below the line’ workers and
move away from auteur-based narratives of the film production process, instead revealing
the collaborative process of filmmaking and investigating previously undervalued
contributors. Positively much of this research focusses on the stories of women, however
these are predominately cis gendered, heterosexual white women. These stories should be
told but space also needs to be made for other voices to avoid reinforcing “institutional
whiteness” and further entrenching discrimination.
Drawing on studies by Jemma Desai and Clive Nwonka on representation within cultural
organisations, discussion from theorists such as Stuart Hall and Sara Ahmed and analysis of
the available literature I aim to challenge this problematic trend. Considering Peter
Tatchell’s recent call to return Pride to its roots of solidarity between LGBTQ+ people,
“women’s liberation, black and Irish communities, working class people and trade unions”
and recent criticisms of the police and the need for solidarity in the face of institutional
discrimination, this issue is urgent.
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Through reflection on my own research practice and awareness of the need for solidarity
amongst all oppressed people I want to explore responsible and caring ways we can
approach research to move the conversation forward. I would like to open this discussion
to others and to ask that we all reflect on our practice and ways that we can stand together
to build a sustainable, ethical and responsible framework for research that reflects on the
past to build a better future.
Catriona Mcavoy is a PhD student at Sheffield Hallam University. Her research focusses on
below the line workers and decentering narratives from the Stanley Kubrick Archive. She
has worked as a post producer in the film industry and has also presented research at many
international conferences. She co-edited Selling Sex on Screen: From Weimar Cinema to
Zombie Porn (2015) and has published several journal articles and book chapters including
in Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives (2015), Norman Mailer: Film is Like Death (2017), The
Oxford Journal of Adaptation (2015) and The Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick
(2021).
Adelaide McGinity-Peebles, Precarious Nature and Identity in the Indigenous

Cinema of the Sakha Republic (Russian Federation)
Since 2016, the cinema of the Sakha Republic has gained international and national acclaim
and plaudits, consolidating its status as Russia’s most successful regional, Indigenous film
industry. However, Sakha cinema also boasts a significant audience at home in the Republic,
who frequently favour Sakha films over Hollywood alternatives at the box office. Sakha
cinema has undoubtedly become the major cultural tool in the Republic for exploring and
promoting Sakha nationhood and cultural identity, domestically and abroad. This paper
explores the role of Sakha film in promoting and educating audiences about Sakha rituals
and customs, particularly regarding the Sakha nature and environment, which are so
important to the identity and very survival of the Sakha people. While the Republic’s nature
and traditions are in a precarious state due to a combination of factors (climate change, out-
migration and, historically speaking, Russian/Soviet colonialism and aggressive mining),
Sakha cinema plays a vital role in centering Sakha rituals and customs at the heart of what
it means to be Sakha in the 21st century. In this paper, I draw on three diverse but equally
pertinent examples of this phenomenon to illustrate my argument: Toyon Kyyl (The Lord
Eagle, 2018); 24 Snega (24 Snows, 2016); and Pugalo (The Scarecrow, 2020).
Adelaide McGinity-Peebles is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of
Nottingham, UK, where she is conducting her research project “Figurations of the Arctic in
Russian Cinema, 2010-Present”. She is completing her first monograph titled Imaging the
Russian Heartlands: Contemporary Nationhood in the Cinema of Russia’s Provinces, which is
under contract with Cornell University Press and scheduled for publication in 2024. She has
published articles on gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality in post-Soviet cinema in the Slavic
and East European Journal, Film Studies, The Routledge Companion to European Cinema,
and The Oxford Research Encylopedia of Race, Ethnicity and Communication.
Laura McMahon, Care, solidarity and entanglement in Khady Sylla’s Une

fenêtre ouverte (2005)
Une fenêtre ouverte (2005), a documentary by the Senegalese writer and filmmaker Khady
Sylla, offers an intimate, unsettling portrait of her friend, Aminta Ngom, as the film viscerally
registers the mental health issues suffered by both filmmaker and subject. There are ethical
questions here of consent and exposure, as Bronwen Pugsley suggests in her reading of
the film. Pugsley points to the ethical risks of the documentary’s possible exploitation of
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Ngom’s condition, and of its problematic construction of parallels between Sylla and Ngom.
I pursue this question of ethical risk, but I draw the discussion in a slightly different direction
by reading this intense mode of entanglement between filmmaker and subject as a practice
of care. Key to this practice of care is the film’s temporality, its patience and sustained
engagement – what Debarati Sanyal describes in another context as ‘the solidarity of
attention’ (2022: 92). I ask how Sylla’s film undertakes a practice of care that is feminist in its
sustained attentiveness to Ngom’s subjectivity and corporeality, as well as to the constraints
– gendered, familial and economic – that govern her life. I explore how this practice of care
is also extended to the filmmaking self, as Sylla reflexively and performatively turns the
camera upon her own body and subjectivity. While invoking a history of care and solidarity
in non-Western feminist documentary (e.g. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Jocelyne Saab), I also draw on
recent scholarship on the ethics of care in documentary, including a special issue of French
Screen Studies (2022).
Laura McMahon is an Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies at the University of
Cambridge. She is the author of Animal Worlds: Film, Philosophy and Time (Edinburgh
University Press, 2019) and Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson,
Duras and Denis (Legenda, 2012). She is currently working on a project on feminist
historiography and moving image practice, examining engagements with memory,
temporality and the archival in recent film and video work by female filmmakers.
Matt Melia, Zappa (2020) and the Zappa ‘Vault’ – Film as Archive
For his 2020 documentary film Zappa, director Alex Winter was given access to the privately
held archive of the pioneering American musician, filmmaker and anti-censorship activist
Frank Zappa. Zappa died in 1993 and his archives have since been kept by the Zappa trust
and his widow Gail Zappa (who died during the making of the documentary). Like the
Stanley Kubrick Archives, the Zappa Archives contain a wide ranging and comprehensive
collection of material from across Zappa’s life and work from his early childhood film-
making experiments to later animated film-making and amateur films to recordings (some
of which remain unreleased) , ephemera, fconcert footage, interviews and material relating
to his campaigning. The Zappa archive, in LA, is not public facing and, according to Winter,
had been in a state of decay prior to the making of the documentary.
Hence This paper, somewhat hypothetically given that I have not yet visited the Zappa
archives (and which have now been bought by Universal) , aims to consider how the film
documentary engages with (and even imposes itself) upon the physical space and material
of the Zappa archive. It considers the restoration of the Zappa archive by Winter and asks
how the film itself can be considered as part of the project in sustaining and maintaining
the material therein. It asks the broader question, how do we engage and make the most
of archival space when that space is not available? The paper forms the very start of a
potential research project on Zappa and will draw on not only the only existing paper on
the Zappa archive by Maureen Russell (in which she interviews “Zappa Archive
‘Vaultmeister’ Joe Travers’), but also (hopefully) interviews with Alex Winter as well as the
Zappa trust.
Matt Melia is a Senior lecturer in Film, Media and Literature at Kingston University. His
specialist interests include the work of both Stanley Kubrick and Ken Russell and he has
published widely on both. His publications include The Jaws Book: New Perspectives on
the Classic Summer Blockbiuster (Bloomsbury, 2021), Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick
and A Clockwork Orange (Palgrave, 2023) and ReFocus: The Films of Ken Russell (EUP,
2022). He is also editor of The Jurassic Park Book: Thirty Years of Spielberg’s Dinosaurs
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(Forthcoming, Bloomsbury: 2023). Matt’s research is archive-focussed and he is hoping to
be able to visit the Frank Zappa ‘Vault’ in the next year.
Carla Mereu Keating, Blinding lights: Ferraniacolor and the hazards of working
with novel film technologies
In January 1952, inside Stage 2 of the Ponti-De Laurentiis film studios in Rome, on set
shooting started for the film that would go down in history as Italy’s first colour feature Totò
a colori (1952) starring popular Neapolitan comedian Totò. The casting of Totò, chosen to
bring to the screen the innovative colour system Ferraniacolor, produced by domestic film
stock manufacturer Ferrania, paid off by generating high box office returns. Ferraniacolor
gained international visibility when the process was chosen against more established
alternatives to capture Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Australia (the documentary The Queen
in Australia, 1954). Processed in the UK at Denham’s film laboratories, the film achieved
impressive results ‘often turning the screen into a riot of color’, as described by an
anonymous reviewer. Looking back at the application of the Ferraniacolor process in the
1950s, the paper aims to assess the impact that the introduction of colour technologies had
for Italian film studios and the film crews who first adopted these and other novel filming
processes and techniques when working on studio sets. Revisiting memoires of filmmakers
and studio workers involved in the making of Ferraniacolor films during the early 1950s, the
paper highlights the risks that existed when shooting colour films, and the hazardous,
harmful conditions (e.g. adverse health effects) that are thought to have resulted.
Carla Mereu Keating is a Research Associate, University of Bristol, working on the ERC-
funded project STUDIOTEC. In 2016-29 Carla was British Academy Post-Doctoral Research
Fellow in the School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol, where she teaches
translation and international film distribution. Carla has previously taught at the Universities
of Reading and London Southbank, and was Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for the
Study of Cultural Memory, University of London (2015-2016). She has published The Politics
of Dubbing (2016), and research on the industrial, political and material issues which
underpin the production and global circulation of film and media.
Kayla Meyers, Infinite Possibilities: Imagining a Future through the Multiverse

The compounding crises of the last two decades have left little room for imagining our
collective future. Looming ecological collapse, threat of new pandemics, ascendant
authoritarianism, and the failures of governments and peacekeeping organizations to
respond effectively have left populations despondent and impotent. There has emerged a
pervasive sense that under extant economic and political conditions, there is no escaping
these existential threats. But in the early-2020s, during a time of immense uncertainty, the
cinematic trope commonly known as the multiverse caught mass appeal. Films like Doctor
Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022),
Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), Loki (2021), and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
(2018) all break "the iron grip of a single, predetermined timeline" (Nussbaum, 2022) by
deploying the multiverse as a storytelling technique. I argue the multiverse provides a
framework for hope and longevity. While cynically we can understand the use of the
multiverse as a means for conglomerates like Disney to limitlessly iterate blockbuster
successes, their appeal speaks to this trope's resonance with audiences. In creating a space
to imagine infinite possibilities, the multiverse offers the viewer pathways toward solving
intransigent issues and dreaming of a better future. But even as these films allow us to
envision limitless worlds, their plots and characters' still privilege a single timeline and
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"return to how it was before." So rather than the multiverse being a pure vehicle for
escapism, it is a productive space where we can transform, course correct, and survive.
Kayla Meyers is an independent scholar and writer whose work examines the intersections
between visual culture, race, gender, digital media, and US politics through the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries. Her publications include the article “‘Straight Outta Congress’:
Blacking Up the Tea Party Movement” (Journal of Popular Culture, Summer 2019), the book
Who Said What: A Writer's Guide to Finding, Evaluating, Quoting, and Documenting Sources
(And Avoiding Plagiarism) (2020), and the chapter “I Figured You Were Probably Watching
Us”: Performing Gender and Citizen Surveillance in Ex Machina" (Bloomsbury, 2022). She
serves as Programming Manager for SXSW EDU in Austin, Texas, USA.
Rachel Milne, “Hardship Within the Context of Joy”: Rafiki’s Queer Resistance
Representations of Africa in film have been repeatedly haunted by a regressive single-story
narrative that focuses on the ongoing effects of colonialism and racism. In Wanuri Kahiu’s
2018 feature film Rafiki, however, this pessimistic narrative is replaced by what Kahiu
conceptualises as ‘Afrobubblegum’. At once a visual preference and a political statement,
Afrobubblegum filmmaking makes use of bright and playful aesthetics to depict African
subjects “living a beautiful vibrant life” (Kahiu 2017). Afrobubblegum art therefore places a
focus on liberated futures through gentle forms of resistance, unbounded self-expressions,
and an immersion in diurnal and frivolous activities that are specifically, or plausibly, African.
In telling the story of Kena and Ziki, two young girls who fall in love, Kahiu subverts
conventional queer narratives of control and resistance in favour of foregrounding a gentle
lesbian love story. Without evading or denying the obstacles that queer Africans routinely
face, Kahiu ultimately situates portrayals of violence, silence, and alternative modes of
resistance “within the context of joy” (Kahiu 2019). Through a focus on the film’s narrative of
queer becoming (Bradway 2015), alongside a consideration of its aesthetics, I argue that
Rafiki is important not just as a cultural representation of marginalised identities, but also as
a form of immersion that is in itself activist in its ability to foster a sense of belonging, and a
vision of a shared future, for queer African audiences.
Rachel Milne is a Visiting Lecturer at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. She holds a
BA (Hons) in Media from Queen Margaret University, and an MLitt in Comparative Literature
from the University of Glasgow. Much of her research investigates representations of
marginalised identities in literature and film. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed
journals and blogs, and she has presented her research on depictions of disability,
queerness, and childhood in literature and film at various international conferences.
Stuart Moore and Kayla Parker, Our Camera is Not a Projector: Co-creation as a
Strategy of Resistance
This presentation will discuss how and why our process-based collaborative practice rejects
the ‘auteur’ who projects or imposes their will on the production and considers the pro-
filmic to be a canvas or screen for their ideations. Although the essay film can be thought of
as a subversive form of documentary, the auterial tendency is often present in the narration.
Using examples from our filmmaking practice, we provide a critical perspective on the
methods we have evolved in response.
At the end of the 19th century, Louis and Auguste Lumière used their Cinématographe to
capture and project their actualités, or ‘motion pictures’, of everyday life. Initially, the
brothers filmed life ‘as it happened’ before the camera. The ‘purity’ of this actualité – a single
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unedited shot of ‘action’ that emphasized the lifelike movement – gradually became
corrupted, as filmmakers responded to their audiences’ appetite for spectacle, leading
mainstream film away from experimentation with the medium to the traditional theatrical
narrative structure dominant in cinema and the tendency for the filmmaker to project their
ideations onto and into the film took hold.
We have developed a filmmaking methodology that embeds the reflexive inter-subjectivity
of dialogic process. Its exploratory, contingent nature enables us to foster new methods and
‘ways of seeing’, allowing relationships and interactions to emerge, rather than pursuing
pre-conceived outcomes. What ‘comes out’ is not our ‘vision’ of what we think or imagine
the film to be: we spend time being open and receptive, allowing the making process itself
to co-create the film.
Stuart Moore is an accomplished filmmaker and sound artist and an experienced
cinematographer, having worked professionally on television wildlife and natural history
series. He has won awards from London Short Film Festival and two South West Media
Innovation Awards for his innovative short films. His recent 16mm film Zinn, commissioned
for the Dark Skies project, featured in The Lab’s Light Field (San Francisco) and the Visions
in the Nunnery exhibition (London). He is currently completing a 3D3 AHRC-funded
practice-led PhD focused on the personal Super8 archive, film and memory at the Digital
Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England, Bristol.
Kayla Parker is an artist film-maker who creates innovative works using film-based and
digital technologies. Her research interests centre around subjectivity and place,
embodiment, and technological mediation. In her practice, she uses process-based
methods informed by écriture feminine to explore the interrelationship between bodies
and liminal spaces. Kayla lectures at University of Plymouth where she co-ordinates the
Early Career Researcher Network in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business and
supervises artists’ doctoral research projects. She has curated many programmes of artists'
moving image, including ‘Passing Through’ for the British Art Show 9, Plymouth (2022). Her
publications include chapters and extended essays on film-making.
Jonathan Murray, The Spy Writer Who came in from the Cold: post 1989 screen
adaptations of John le Carré
Between the Cold War’s ostensible end in 1989 and visible re-emergence in the early 2020s,
espionage narratives remained a prominent and insistently topical strand of British
audiovisual production. That phenomenon has ensured that the screen spy remains a major
popular cultural archetype through which British identity, history and geopolitical status are
defined and debated. One important and visible strand within this process has involved the
production of no fewer than 9 post-1989 screen adaptions of the works of English novelist
John le Carré (1931-2020). Examining the contemporary canon of le Carré adaptations
from The Russia House (1990) to The Little Drummer Girl (2018), this paper explores two
interrelated areas of interest. The first involves identification of the key reasons for diverse
filmmakers’ enhanced post-1989 level of collective interest in le Carré’s work, and the
second, the position of post-1989 screen adaptations of le Carré within contemporary
British screen espionage fiction’s central preoccupations, including: interrogation of
Britain’s involvement in modern military conflicts from WWII to Iraq; re-imaginings of the
figure of British spy as non-male, non-white and/or non-heterosexual); debates around the
historic, present-day and future British state’s identity, history, geopolitical status and
integrity.  
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Jonathan Murray is Senior Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture at Edinburgh College of Art,
University of Edinburgh. He is a former editor of Visual Culture in Britain and Animation
Journal and is a contributing writer on the permanent staff of Cineaste magazine. His
publications include the books Discomfort and Joy: the Cinema of Bill Forsyth (2011)
and The New Scottish Cinema (2015).
Caitriona Noonan and Inge Sørensen, European Screen Agencies and

Sustainability: Interventions for Greening the Screen
This paper reports on the work performed by European screen agencies to support,
facilitate and create a greener film and television industry. It interrogates the rhetoric of
sustainability employed by publicly funded agencies in smaller nations including the Danish
Film Institute (DFI), Screen Ireland (Fís Éireann), Screen Scotland, Film Cymru and Vlaams
Audiovisueel Fonds (Flanders Audio-visual Fund). In the last few years environmental
sustainability has emerged as a more visible concern amongst some screen agencies. These
bodies are not environmental agencies, and so they rarely have specific mandates to act
around climate change. Nonetheless, they are a critical source of funding, resources and
mobility for filmmakers, and so they have some levers which could be used to encourage
change.
Drawing on empirical evidence from interviews and discussions with professionals, screen
agencies and the newly instated role of Sustainability Manager in many agencies and
production companies, our research points to a typology of responses and actions currently
being pursued, revealing commonalties in the approaches employed but also several
problematic logics underpinning these interventions.
Our research reveals that any radical ambition to change the environmental credentials of
the sector are tempered by the careful balance that they feel they must strike around
ambitions for economic growth, national competitiveness and innovative creative practice.
We conclude that for screen agencies to be more effective and urgent agents of
environmental change, fundamental changes would need to happen within their expertise,
funding allocation and public mandate.
Caitriona Noonan is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at Cardiff
University. Her research is on screen production, labour and policy. She is co-author of the
book Producing British Television Drama: Local Production in a Global Era (Palgrave, 2019)
and her work appears in the International Journal of Cultural Policy, Cultural Trends, and the
European Journal of Cultural Studies. Caitriona was principal investigator on an AHRC-
funded project 'Screen Agencies as Cultural Intermediaries: Negotiating and Shaping
Cultural Policy for the Film and TV Industries within Small Nations'.  A book on this project
will be published by Palgrave in 2023.
Inge Sørensen is Lecturer in Media Policy at Centre for Cultural Policy Research, University
of Glasgow. She researches the practices, policies and political economy of national and
global screen industries with particular focus on Public Service Media, streamers, screen
agencies, funding models as well as environmental sustainability and EDI. Inge peer reviews
for AHRC and UKRI. She advises the British and Scottish governments, national screen
agencies, regulators, and trade unions in the UK, Scotland and Denmark. She is currently
Principal Investigator on Sustainable Screen Scotland, a RSE Network Grant, and The
Thunberg Test, funded by UKRI and Screen Scotland.
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Chris Nunn and Jonathan Wroot, ““Don’t Stop The Camera!” – Insights into
Japanese independent and low-budget film production through
contemporary international successes”
One Cut of the Dead (dir. Shinichiro Ueda, 2017) is one of the most successful Japanese
films to highlight low-budget film production within Japan. This film was largely made by a
cast and crew of volunteers, through workshops where participants pay to get a film project
completed. Third Window Films has released other titles made through this method, on
DVD and Blu-ray, such as Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes (dir. Junta Yamaguchi, 2020), as
well as producing films that reflect on similar exploitative practices within their narratives,
such as Lowlife Love (dir. Eiji Uchida, 2015).
Adam Torel, Managing Director of Third Window Films (a UK distributor of Japanese
cinema), has spoken frequently of the issues and limitations brought up by these practices
within Japan. Through a reception study approach, insights into Japanese independent and
low-budget film production can be gained. This raises questions in terms of creativity and
labour on this scale. It also draws comparisons with independent filmmaking practices of
other countries. Can such workshop models, not dissimilar to those in the UK in the 1980s,
provide a much-needed challenge to the status-quo, and a platform for new and emerging
film talent?
This paper will therefore provide a summative overview of the ethical complications
brought up by such methods, which are frequently utilized by low-budget and first-time
filmmakers in Japan. It will question how sustainable these practices are, both for artistic
development and progress, as well as consider the implications for wider national
filmmaking policies in Japan, and beyond.
Chris Nunn is Assistant Professor of Film at the University of Birmingham. As the former
Festival Director of Screentest: The UK’s National Student Film Festival, he has been
championing aspiring filmmaking talent for nearly a decade. Passionate about filmmaking
education, he has recently completed his PhD entitled Towards a New Film Pedagogy:
Recrafting Undergraduate Filmmaking Education for an Expanded Field (2019) and plans
to continue and broaden research in this area. In 2021 Chris became co-convenor of
‘Film/making Pedagogy’ a new ‘Special Interest Group’ as part of the British Association of
Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS). He is also currently Associate Editor of the
Film Education Journal.
Jonathan Wroot is Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for Film Studies at the University
of Greenwich. He has frequently published book chapters and articles on home media
formats; the distribution and marketing of Japanese and Asian cinema; as well as on horror
cinema. In 2021, he published The Paths of Zatoichi, the first English language study of the
international impact of the blind swordsman character. Throughout 2022, he has appeared
on several podcasts to discuss this research.
Jennifer O’Meara, From Soft Focus to AR filters: the Evolving, Technologically-

Designed Face of Female Stardom
The future of screen studies requires increased attention to the two-way flow of influence
between immersive and deceptive technologies and traditional screen media. To this end,
my paper charts the relationship between historical and contemporary technologies that
create idealised versions of the female face on screen. Building on scholarship on stardom,
gender and deepfakes, analogue filtration effects from classical Hollywood (including the
application of Vaseline, stockings and other fabrics to the camera lens to create a “Gaussian
Girl” effect) will be compared to trends for augmented reality (AR) beauty filters. Such filters
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have been critiqued for their negative impact on self-esteem, with women in particular
seeking surgery in order to look more like their AR representations (RyanMosley 2021). But
they are yet to be examined from a screen studies perspective. To address this, I will
reference historical screen works that foreground the female face as a technological design
experiment, including the use of fabric filters on shots of Marlene Dietrich in The Scarlet
Empress (1934) and the use of de-aging effects on Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn in Death
Becomes Her (1992). I will also examine images of classical Hollywood actresses who have
been “reimagined” via digital filters, thus merging traditional and contemporary screen
beauty effects. The latter examples will help underscore how AR and deepfake
technologies can: 1) work to democratize glamour effects from cinema history for the
masses, while; 2) subjecting female stars to more damaging forms of commodification,
idealisation and (digital) over-exposure, even in death.
Jennifer O’Meara is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin. She has
published on a diverse range of film and media topics in venues such as Cinema Journal,
Feminist Media Studies, Celebrity Studies and The Velvet Light Trap. Her second monograph
Women’s Voices in Digital Media was published by University of Texas Press in 2022. Her
current research project, funded by an Irish Research Council Starting Laureate Award
(2022- 2026), is titled “From Cinematic Realism to Extended Reality: Reformulating Screen
Studies at the Precipice of Hyper-reality.”
Nikolaus Perneczky, World Film Heritage: Decolonising Care and Sustainability

in Global Audiovisual Archiving
The history of North-South cooperation in the field of film preservation and archiving
predates the end of colonial rule. Then as now, as Ghaddar (2022) observes with respect to
archival records more generally, “the Western archival community tended to evade the
central questions of power and inequality” by recourse to “technical and professional
arguments”— part of a larger and persistent pattern of what decolonial scholars have come
to call “archival paternalism” (Agostinho 2019). Western archival standards and practices
are not only inadequate to archival realities in the Global South but can, as Carolina Cappa
put it at Eye Conference 2022, turn into “prison concepts”. Departing from practices of
“imperfect” archiving (from the hacking of equipment to the recycling of obsolete
technology), film archivists in the Global South have developed a more fundamental
critique of protocols of long-term, high-standard preservation and restoration in ethical,
economic, and ecological perspective. Importantly, the critical insights gleaned from these
archival practitioners are relevant far beyond their places of origin, as the untapped
potential of indigenous practices and technologies of care—for instance, the use of African
adobe architectures for low-energy cooling (Sanogo quoted in Cosgrove 2019)—may yet
gain wider traction on a warming planet. Such reliance on local solutions, however, does
not imply that the challenges facing archivists in the Global South are essentially “home-
made”. Rather, they are the outcome of a long history of uneven development and unequal
exchange in the field of global audiovisual archiving which, I will argue in conclusion, calls
on Western archival institutions to engage in a process of “constructive reparations” (Táíwò
2022).
Nikolaus Perneczky is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of
London. His postdoctoral project, “Restitution and the Moving Image”, considers colonial
legacies of uneven development and unequal exchange in global audiovisual archiving
through the lens of restitution.
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Anat Pick, Éric Rohmer’s Vegetal Ethics
This paper will focus on The Green Ray (1986) as an example of a ‘green theology’ of film.
Drawing on Simone Weil’s idea of metaxu, a bridge between the material and transcendent,
I explore Rohmer’s summer comedy as a form of sustainable cinema, revolving around the
double meaning of the chlorophyllic: plant sustenance and divine grace.
Anat Pick is Reader in Film at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author
of Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (Columbia UP, 2011),
co-editor of Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human (Berghahn, 2013), and has
published widely on animals in film and non-anthropocentric film philosophy. Her current
book project, on Simone Weil and cinema, contributes to an eco-centric theory of film at a
time of environmental crisis.
Agnieszka Piotrowska, The ethics of collaboration – a personal experience

Wash (2022)
The presentation consists of a short theoretical paper and a moving image presentation.
Wash (2022) is a hybrid documentary which was funded by Strategic Research England
2021. It uses a variety of creative tools (documentary, drama, animation, paintings, Zoom
recordings). The project was initiated as a collaboration between Professor Mutapi of the
Edinburgh, the University of Zimbabwe and artists internationally. It builds on a piece of
creative research work in Zimbabwe , the various moving image pieces of work, that had
been screened extensively internationally and also published in Screenworks in 2019 and
2021.
Wash was inspired by the immunology and social studies research carried out by the
University of Edinburgh and the University of Zimbabwe. Their project focused on an
attempt to curb the spread of diseases through a variety of simple tools. In particular, the
researchers tried to encourage the community to build toilets where they were not any.
What Mutapi discovered was that there was an unexpected resistance to the project – on
the part of women. It transpired that the women used the walk to the toilet as a space for
communications.
We therefore wanted to explore gently the issue of the Difference which does not run across
the lines of ethnicity but rather across the lines of education and class. The paper explores
different levels of ethical collaborations in this hybrid work which is being used by NGOs
globally. The work itself and the process of making it brings to the fore a discussion of a
collaborative activist documentary film making and the challenges it presents.
Agnieszka Piotrowska is an award-winning BBC trained -filmmaker and a theorist. She is a
Reader in Film at SODA, Manchester School of Art,, and a Visiting Professor in Film at the
University of Gdansk, Poland.  She is the Former Head of the School for Film, Media and the
Performing Arts at the UCA, UK She was the Director of the global network ‘s conference
Visible Evidence held in the summer of 2022 at the University of Gdansk. Piotrowska has
written extensively on psychoanalysis and cinema and is the author of Psychoanalysis and
Ethics in Documentary Film (2014, Routledge.)  Its Second Edition in will be published in
2023.
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Victoria Pistivsek, Caring White Men?: American Masculinity, Liberal
Resistance, and Funny Sustainable Failures in Contemporary Hollywood
Cinema
Discourses around ‘angry white men’ and ‘crisis of masculinity’ are commonplace in 21st
century America. In the wake of rapidly changing gender and racial politics and the
resulting pressures acting on hegemonic masculinity, Amanda Lotz has suggested that, on
screen, it is particularly the maladjusted anti-hero who mediates angry white men’s
uncertainties and dissatisfactions with contemporary life, for this figure is eager to reclaim
white heteropatriarchal power through violent, hypermasculine, and toxic means. However,
I posit that due to recent cultural turmoil—the coronavirus pandemic; the #MeToo and BLM
movements; Donald Trump’s presidency and the regressive macho-populist politics it
disseminated—representations of men have significantly transformed. Considering how
across the contemporary American mediascape explicit liberal critique and progressive
action have seemingly taken root, this paper argues that onscreen male constructions have
shifted toward ‘resistance’ and ‘care,’ acting as dramatized correctives for real world
troubles; this may be especially true for narratives involving ‘sustainable futures.’ By
examining two Hollywood films, Don’t Look Up (2021) and Downsizing (2017), which
comically allegorize the climate crisis and (Trumpian) political instability, I will show how
their male protagonists are defined in opposition to ‘toxic masculinity,’ exhibiting extreme
emotional care for and anxiety over how to save the world from (climate) disaster. Yet, since
these satirical texts feature pessimistic endings and anti-heroic tendencies, I will unpack the
ways in which (conservative) doubt is strategically cast on caring hegemonic men as well as
on sustainable futures by presenting both as laughable and doomed to fail.
Victoria K. Pistivsek is a PhD researcher and Graduate Teaching Assistant in the
Department of Film Studies at King’s College London. Her doctoral project investigates
angry white men, troubled gender politics, and crisis culture in post-2016 American film
and television.
Tia Price, True Crime Dark Fandom: The Dominatrix and The Dildo
Ryan Broll posited the concept of dark fandom with specific reference to Columbiners, fans
of the 1999 Columbine High School shooters; this he extends to include those who are fans
of people ‘who commit heinous acts’ (Broll, 2019). This paper will examine dark fan
participation in the already ethically complex genre of true crime, with particular focus
being paid to the sexualisation of the serial killer through the creation and use of sex aids.
These items, often created and released as unofficial additions to Netflix documentaries,
reflect a fascination with true crime, and show the extent to which interest in the genre has
exceeded the limitations of the screen.
The products considered here are serial killer-themed sex aids created by dark fan Nico
Claux and sold on the website Serial Pleasures. These objects demonstrate an extreme
arena of dark fandom whereby thresholds of taste have been crossed and notions of
respect have been knowingly dismissed. The objects themselves are based on specific
serial killers, sexualise acts of abuse and penetration and promote stigmas related to queer
sex. Language used to promote the items leans upon connotations of abuse and the
resurrection of notorious and long dead murderers, which has the effect of re-victimising
victims as the re-enactment of their killers’ crimes is marketed as a way to achieve sexual
pleasure. The true crime genre is already an ethically problematic area yet these items
highlight an acceleration in ethically transgressive cultural practice.
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Tia Price is a PhD student at the University of Portsmouth. Her research focuses on the
representation of the corpse in popular culture and its relationship to dark fandom. Due to
be published in a forthcoming Routledge Handbook Museums, Heritage, and Death (2023),
she has also presented on the representation of murder victims in private museums (2020)
and the performative resurrection of the corpse within dark tourism (2022). She works as an
SpLD Tutor and Assessor.
Chiara Quaranta, Echo and Narcissus: Listening to Film as Being-with

The myth of Echo and Narcissus tells of the conflicting relationship between a resonant
voice (Echo) and a mirrored image (Narcissus), from which a hierarchy between sound and
image and a gendering of the two is derivative. The fable also hints at the cultural self-
referentiality of the visual and the relationality of the sonorous –a discrepancy on which
Jean-Luc Nancy, among others, elaborates, emphasising sound’s tendency towards a
relation. If sound is thus conceived as potentially highly relational, then there cannot be
aurality without some form of co-participation –and indeed, even in the myth’s liminal case
of a two-voice monologue, when Narcissus (the image) ceases to speak, Echo completely
loses her voice because of the lack of the other’s sounds to repeat. My argument unfolds
from sound’s potential for establishing an ethically charged relationship between spectator
and the film within which listening is conducive to the formation of a community who share
an openness to the irreducible alterity of the other. An engagement with (gendered, classed
and racialised) listening shifts focus from the speaker (i.e., character/film) to the listener
(i.e., the spectator), promoting spectatorial empathic efforts through sounds not necessarily
reducible to fixed meaning. By looking at Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood, Agnieszka
Smoczyńska’s The Lure and Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch, I will outline the ethical
possibilities of listening to female voices in films wherein the sonorous significantly renders
embodied, relational subjectivities and encourages a spectatorial engagement defined in
terms of reciprocity and co-existence.
Chiara Quaranta is Teaching Fellow in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh and a
board member of the journal Film-Philosophy. Her research interests lie at the intersection
of philosophy and cinema, with particular attention to ethics and aesthetics.
Sophie Quin, Of elk and wolves: Extinction and evocations of species from the
Irish animated bestiary
In recent years, a number of Irish animation productions have symbolically resurrected
interpretations of now extinct Irish fauna; Alan Shannon’s The Last Elk (2000) and Tomm
Moore and Ross Stewart’s Wolfwalkers (2020). This paper will discuss the approach to
human/non-human animal interactions within each film and propose that a 21st century
understanding of the natural world and ecological awareness colours these, changing
historical fact to suit narrative aims. In The Last Elk, humans are seen to kill the final elk even
though this species became extinct 11,000 years ago and is unlikely to have met with
humans. Meanwhile, Wolfwalkers takes a different approach to the animal/human
relationship as human protagonists are allied with these wild wolves, literally becoming
them. This narrative speaks instead to a version of reconciliation and a reversal of the
narrative of the wolf as merely a dangerous predator and the human as hunter hellbent on
carrying out their extinction. It will be argued that within both narratives the animals are not
overtly anthropomorphised and remain viably animated as ‘realistic’ animals. Consequently,
it will be questioned if our encounter with these species, although animated drawings,
could be read as more authentic to the real creatures on which they were based. Both works
lean into motifs of Celtic design and flaunt evidently Irish narratives suggesting that these
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animated films are powerful vehicles advocating for the beauty and worth of the natural
world and potentially suggest ways to conserve and accept responsibility for the demise of
species.
Sophie Quin is an early career researcher and recent graduate of the Master of Arts by
Research programme at the Institute of Art Design and Technology (IADT) in Dún Laoghaire,
Dublin. She received a BA Hons degree in Animation from IADT in 2019, specialising in
hand-drawn animation and filmmaking. Her MA research, “Quin Films: Children’s
Animation, National Broadcasting and Irish Cultural Identity,” received funding from the Irish
Research Council under the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship Programme
2021. Her interests include Irish animation history, animals in animation, stop-motion, and
the use of archives to better understand historical animation practices.
Lucas Rinzema, Care and Cow

Andrea Arnold’s 2021 documentary Cow takes an intimate approach to the daily life of
Luma, a dairy cow, and one of her calves. Affectively, Cow is a caring film: close-ups and
shaky camerawork create reciprocalities between film, viewer and cow. Nonetheless, it
documents the life of a cow who is stuck in an abusive system. Bracketing the film’s activist
potential and affective involvement, we can see clearly that the film does not interfere
helpfully in Luma’s life: while it clearly cares about this specific cow, and while it might help
promote more caring human-cow relations, it intrudes her space carelessly. This talk maps
these ambivalences, thinking through embodied cinematic immersion, its generation of
caring interspecies relationality, and the problematics of ethical distance in documentary
filmmaking. To unpack this, I stay with “the tensions between care as maintenance doings
and work, affective engagement, and ethico-political involvement.” (Puig de la Bellacasa
2017, 6). I attempt to flesh out the both caring and uncaring human-cow relations that Cow
produces by means of a combination of film phenomenology—affording an account of the
ways the film ties the bodies of viewers and film together (e.g., Barker 2009; Sobchack 1992;
2004)—and a linguistic approach to the ways in which cows talk to us (e.g., Cornips and
Hengel 2021; Cornips 2022)—making it possible to take seriously the role cows play in these
ambivalent relations. These approaches come together to describe the assemblage of cow,
film and human viewer, thereby offering a relational take on the ambivalences of care in
mediated human-animal relations. 
Lucas Rinzema is a Research MA student in Arts, Media and Literary Studies at the University
of Groningen. He holds BA degrees in Philosophy and in Arts, Culture and Media. Current
research interests include feminist posthumanism, human-animal studies, (film-)
phenomenology and (film-)aesthetics. As in the present paper, the focus most often lies at
the intersections of these fields. Besides this, and often relatedly, he is a filmmaker working
mostly on short, non-narrative, ecocritically oriented films.
Karen A. Ritzenhoff, Exploitation and Violence: Precarious Labor in Squid

Game
The international Netflix television series Squid Game from South Korea became a breakout
hit during the global pandemic in the fall 2021. Audiences around the world binge watched
the episodes, depicting contestants fighting to their death to win price money, donated by
voyeuristic foreign spectators. Each time, a contestant dies, the amount increases. Like
gladiators in an arena, the Squid Game contestants are on display in a constructed game
scenario with VIPs watching the carnage from above. This paper will focus on the last two
remaining contestants, battling each other in Episode 9. The protagonist Seong Gi-hun (Lee
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Jung-jae) is facing his childhood friend Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo), a lawyer, who has
played dirty tricks to make it to the end of the games. Both of them have failed in their
personal and professional lives and are unable to sustain themselves in an unforgiving
global economy. However, Seong Gi-hun decides to disrupt the rules of the games and
takes an ethical stand to object the power of greed.
The series resonated during COVID with audiences, faced with similar situations of
precarity: losing secure employment, facing creditors, not being able to afford food or pay
medical bills. The rich elite who facilitates the games to experience a sense of “childhood
fun” (as the dying organizer Oh Il-nam played by Oh Yeong-su explains to Gi-hun on his
deathbed), exploits the contestants in multiple ways: reducing human beings to fighting
sensations, thriving on exploitation and violence, and dismissing suffering as the self-
afflicted.
Karen A. Ritzenhoff is a Professor of Communication at Central Connecticut State
University where she is co-Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is co-
organizer of a hybrid conference on “Squid and Beyond: Utopia and Dystopia in
Contemporary Asian Popular Culture” at CCSU in April 2023. Ritzenhoff co-edited Gender,
Power and Identity in the Films of Stanley Kubrick (Routledge, 2022).
Sofie Roberts, Wales and the Green Screen: Sustainability and Environment in
Welsh Filmmaking
This paper considers Welsh cinema’s response to environmental and sustainability concerns
both on screen and behind the scenes through a contextualised approach. It argues that
contemporary Welsh film narratives are part of wider cultural discussions about protecting
the environment and sustainability and, not unrelatedly, reflective of Welsh filmmaking since
devolution as engaged with the issues, concerns, and viewpoints of a newly liberated and
increasingly confident small nation. This growing confidence was further cemented by the
establishment of Ffilm Cymru Wales, the development agency for Welsh film (2006) and
Wales gaining law-making powers (2011).
There is a growing body of Welsh films that oppose globalised capitalism, economic and
social inequality and ecological devastation. This investigation considers the ways in which
the arts can effectively communicate messages relating to the climate emergency and
sustainability, and that these film narratives relate to real-world Welsh policies. The
messages communicated in films such as American Interior (2014) or Gwledd (The Feast,
2021) align with Welsh Government ambitions, such as the Environment (Wales) Act (2016)
which emphasises sustainable management of natural resources, and The Well-Being of
Future Generations (Wales) Act (2015), trailblazing sustainability legislation to ensure that
actions taken today should not negatively harm tomorrow. Ffilm Cymru Wales is expanding
its sustainability efforts, including development of the Green Cymru Programme (2019) and
an Environmental Policy (2022). This paper considers the cumulative impact of such
initiatives, concluding that despite there not being devolved powers over culture what is
seen at a political level is part of the cultural discourse in Wales.
Sofie Roberts is a Researcher at Bangor University. Her projects involve evaluating
community perceptions and involvement in climate projects aiming at low carbon
emissions and environmental sustainability, and she has a background in the low carbon
sector. Sofie completed her PhD in Film Studies at Bangor University in 2022, analysing
Welsh cinema of the last thirty years through the prism of postcolonial theory, and is
interested in further research into green initiatives and sustainability in film.
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Szilvia Ruszev, New identities of virtual stardom: How do virtual influencers
change or maintain social stereotypes?
Virtual influencers, created and developed for the taste of social media users across fashion,
lifestyle or politics, appear in visual or moving-image formats with digitally created bodies
and choreographed behaviours and opinions. Their appearance is engineered to fully
support their goals as trendsetters. The visual markers defining their identities easily
connect them to established social stereotypes including but not limited to race, gender,
sexuality, ability, and class prescribed by the characteristics of the target audience.
Nevertheless, there is a spectrum of virtual influencers who either maintain or rather
purposefully try to change these social stereotypes. Virtual influencers have been
investigated in the field of marketing studies or from the perspective of affective computing,
both neglecting the question of social stereotypes. I investigate virtual influencers as
characters in a transmedia story world from the perspective of screen studies and media
representation theory. I will investigate celebrity virtual influencers such as Lil Miquela
(@lilmiquela), Imma (@imma.gram), Blawko (@blawko22) and Kami (@itskamisworld) - a
virtual influencer with Down syndrome who has been created from data derived from over
100 young women with Down syndrome. I will compare their visual appearance and the
storytelling strategies used and examine in what ways they maintain or challenge social
stereotypes. I argue that the appearance of these virtual celebrities constitutes an
experience of a hybrid, virtual realism that is defined based on their position on the
spectrum of real–unreal-looking figures of the “uncanny valley” (Mori, MacDorman, &
Kageki, 2012) and full body “avatarisation,” an expanded form of identification with virtual
characters. (Genay, Lécuyer, & Hachet, 2021). This virtual realism offers the possibility of a
flexible and open representation of social stereotypes as an open-ended and modular
representational system that is able to respond to user’s expectations regarding diversity
and inclusion.
Szilvia Ruszev is media artist and researcher, currently holding a position as a Lecturer in
Post Production at Bournemouth University. Her practice-led research engages critically
with various aspects of emergent media and technology, including but not limited to
immersive storytelling, representation in digital media and experimental artistic practices.
Both her academic and practice-based work has been internationally published in peer-
reviewed journals and renowned film festivals and exhibitions.
Viviane Saglier, The “Circulatory Matrix” of Human Rights: Arab Film Festivals
as Communication Infrastructure
This paper investigates the constitution of the Arab Network for Human Rights Film Festivals
(ANHAR) and the implications of the local mediation of international human rights
economies for the regional Arab film production. Established in 2015 by a Jordan-based
collective of thinkers and workers, ANHAR currently counts nine members, with human
rights film festivals in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Mauritania, Tunisia, Morocco, Palestine, the
Sudan and Syria.
Here I follow Meg McLagan’s focus on the “circulatory matrix” of human rights advocacy
“out of which human rights claims are generated and through which they travel” (McLagan
2006, 192). Drawing on fieldwork conducted at the Jordan-based Karama Human Rights
Film Festival, interviews, and discursive analyses of the network’s promotional material, I
examine how ANHAR establishes a multi-faceted platform dedicated to the exchange
between activists and filmmakers, the promotion of co-production, and the support of
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advocacy campaigns. I argue that the creation of a regional network alongside European
formations such as the Human Rights Film Network (HRFN) is best suited to local human
rights needs. Moreover, it enhances Arab cinematic production at large. In effect, by
bridging various local organizations dedicated to supporting independent productions
with film festivals in isolated areas, ANHAR develops a communication infrastructure
(McLagan 2006) for regional human rights, which simultaneously aims to benefit the
development of a regional film industry more broadly. I conclude that the regional
redefinition of human rights cinema includes the necessity of infrastructure, that is to say,
the very possibility to produce human rights films.
Viviane Saglier is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. She is currently
working on a book manuscript on the articulation of colonization, human rights, and film
infrastructures in Palestine.
Ipsita Sahu, From "Voice of God" to "Voice of Nation": Melville Demellow and
the television series Perspective and Now
When television arrived in the late 1960s, it was aligned to the public broadcasting unit of
All Indian Radio (AIR). A new documentary language emerged, shaped not so much by the
longstanding Griersonian form of Films Division( the state documentary unit that continued
from colonial times), but by radio features. In this paper, I map this transformation in the
Indian documentary by focusing on two popular factual programs of the
1970s, Perspective and Now produced and anchored by the iconic radio personality
Melville Demello. Already a household name of significant stature, Demellow's television
series and its distinct travelogue form made dramatic changes to the documentary film's
propaganda style by replacing the typical "voice of god" and repetitive "sights and sounds"
of the state with interviews, oral history, and most distinctly a lyrical and evocative use of
sound. The rhetoric of "truth value" was transferred to Demellow's auteurist legacy in radio
instead of the statist gaze. Moreover, Demellow's Anglo -Indian ethnicity vitally informed
the travelogue documentaries, which mounted grand narratives of national identity by
fusing the colonial settler form of pristine nature with an anthropomorphic Nehruvian vision
of land as “Bhrat-mata” or “Mother-India” . The chapter will look at episodes
of Perspective and Now to analyse how key disputes of the seventies around land due to
indigenous dislocation from conservation programs, large scale slum demolition, peasant
unrest and wars with neighbouring countries were negotiated in these documentaries
through its complex visual sign system of televisual landscapes.
Ipsita Sahu is currently pursuing her doctoral in Cinema Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi. Her thesis titled “Arrival of Television in India: A Media Archaeological
Study” explores the changing audio-visual context of 1970s India, linked to the entry of
television. Sahu’s work on single-screen theatre and urban history was recently published
in the BioScope journal.
Libby Saxton, ‘The Anguish of the Future’: Iconicity, Sustainability and

Mushroom Clouds
How do filmic and photographic images collude with, and imagine redressing, the forms of
domination that have turned humanity into a new kind of nature? Cinema’s imprints of and
on nonhuman nature – its physical links to the world it records and whose resources it
depletes – have received close attention. Preoccupied with the index, the intensifying
debate about what Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway call ‘cinema beyond the human’ has
largely ignored another kind of sign: the icon. Yet the genre of photographs and film
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sequences that we now describe as iconic, entangled as it is with the most controversial
aspects of humanism, has helped to demarcate and define an era when humanity has
become, in Jennifer Fay’s words, a ‘geological force’. For example, film of the military test
that, according to some geologists, marked the start of this epoch distorted the natural
phenomenon of the cloud into the template for one of its most prominent symbols. Writing
on American environmentalism, Finis Dunaway suggests that iconic images, including
iterations of the mushroom cloud, ‘have impeded efforts to realise – or even imagine –
sustainable visions of the future’. My paper will complicate this claim by considering cameo
and leading roles by mushroom clouds in films including Children of Hiroshima (Kaneto
Shindo, Japan, 1952), Being Women (Cecilia Mangini, Italy, 1965) and I Saw the World End
(Es Devlin and Machiko Weston, UK, 2020) and recent augmented reality artworks by Nancy
Baker Cahill. These works all contend with what Éric Rohmer, discussing Hiroshima mon
amour (Alain Resnais, France, 1959), named ‘the anguish of the future’, but also contemplate
the prospect of worlds, human and ‘natural’, without violence or systems of domination.
Using the mushroom cloud as an example, and borrowing Marie-José Mondzain’s concept
of an ‘iconic empire’, I will explore the photo-cinematic icon’s complicity in, and role in
envisioning alternatives to, humanity’s world-conquering ambitions.
Libby Saxton in Reader in Film at Queen Mary University of London. She is author of
Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (Wallflower, 2008) and No Power
Without an Image: Icons Between Photography and Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2020),
and co-author of Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters (Routledge, 2010). She co-edited
Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium (Legenda,
2013) and a special issue of Paragraph on ‘Religion in Contemporary Thought and Film’
(November 2019). She is working on projects about iconic environmental images and the
colourisation of historical photographs and film.
Chrishandra Sebastiampillai, Runaway film production and film-induced

tourism: sustainability of heritage houses as film sets in Malaysia.
Malaysia emerged at the turn of the millennium as a viable location for runaway film
production – where films are set in one country, but shot in another (Croy and Walker, 2003).
Malaysia’s heritage houses have featured recurringly in various international productions
such as Indian Summers (2015-2016), Crazy Rich Asians (2018) and The Singapore Grip
(2020), bringing local and international film-induced tourism to them. However, there is
currently no regulation on film production in heritage houses nor is there any formal
oversight of how film crews operate in them, leaving the safety of the houses featured to
the relevant owners or film crews.
This paper takes as its case studies the heritage houses featured in the three projects listed
above, namely the early 19th century Georgian mansion of the Governor of Penang, Suffolk
House (Indian Summers), the late 19th century Cheong Fatt Tze Straits eclectic mansion (also
in Penang) and the Neo-Gothic & Tudor Revival late 19th century residence of the British
High Commissioner, Carcosa Seri Negara in Kuala Lumpur (the latter houses both featured
in Crazy Rich Asians and The Singapore Grip). It considers questions such as the harms and
benefits of their use as runaway film production sets and the sustainability (and viability) of
film induced tourism as a means of preserving the houses. It also explores the relationship
of the film and tourism industries with the buildings, and the role of colonial legacies and
migrant narratives in their past and current administration.
Chrishandra Sebastiampillai is Lecturer in Film, Television and Screen Studies at Monash
University Malaysia. Her research interests include stardom and celebrity, the romance
genre and its film couples, and Southeast Asian cinema. Her recent publications include
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works on Henry Golding’s Eurasian stardom, the ‘love teams’ or film couples of popular
Philippine cinema, and Philippine stardom. She is currently working on projects that
examine the representation of Malaysian heritage houses onscreen and the precarious state
of heritage cinema buildings in Malaysia.
Alexander Sergeant, Caring for the World: The Virtue of Superman

To paraphrase a famous passage from Bordwell, Staiger and Thompsons’s The Classical
Hollywood Cinema (1985), it seems excessively obvious to speak about the ethical potential
of a superhero franchise like Superman. With a name derived from George Bernard Shaw’s
translation of Nietzsche’s concept of the übermensch, Superman deals with a narrative
world in which concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are coded more explicitly and individualistically
than even the most hyperbolic of classical Hollywood melodramas. Yet, just as Bordwell
found the obviousness of Hollywood filmmaking the beginning rather than end point of his
stylistic analysis, so too it is important not to allow the hyperbolic nature of the superhero’s
persistent battles with evil to obfuscate a far more nuanced set of ethical concerns made
available to the spectator through the franchise’s affective and experiential potential.
In dialogue with film theory’s ‘ethical turn’ (Jinhee Choi and Matthias Frey, Cine-Ethics
(2013)) over the past two decades and motivated by the global popularity of superhero
narratives, this paper examines how we might account for the broader ethical potential of
the Superman franchise. Drawing from a framework of virtue ethics, it compares and
contrasts how Superman: The Movie (1978), Superman Returns (2006) and Man of Steel
(2013) present ‘goodness’, both stylistically and thematically, and how the nature of that
presentation might fit within a wider series of generic cues and expectations akin to a mode
of ethical practice (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981)). More broadly, it asks what the
figure of the superhero tells us about popular notions of morality in a world increasingly
concerned by such apocalyptic threats as climate change, and how the superhero’s vigilante
mode of caring might guide contemporary understandings of virtue.
Alexander Sergeant is a Senior Lecturer in Film & Media Studies at the University of
Portsmouth He is twice-nominated by BAFTSS for his research, first as the co-editor of
Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (Routledge, 2018)
and second for his more recent monograph Encountering the Impossible: The Fantastic in
Hollywood Fantasy Cinema (SUNY Press 2021). He is the co-founder of Fantasy-
Animation.org and co-host of the Fantasy/Animation podcast.
Alexander Sergeant and Evan Pugh, The Ethics of Reality Television:

Understanding UK Production Cultures
In recent years, controversies over the suicides of Love Island participants Sophie Gradon
and Mike Thalassitis and exposés on the production practices of The Jeremy Kyle Show
have seen a shift in debates over reality television. Once dominated by concerns over the
genre’s troubled and contested relationship to documentary practice, there has been a
move within both popular and critical discourse from an ethics of realism to an ethics of
care as the duties and responsibilities of its practitioners are heavily scrutinised and
debated. These debates have coincided with a recent turn towards ethics within film theory,
as well as an increasing focus on production culture as a key site of critical investigation
(Caldwell, 2008; Dwyer, 2011).
In dialogue with all three of these developments, this paper offers preliminary findings from
an ongoing study of production ethics within the UK reality television industries. Drawing
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from ethical theories of film practice, the co-author’s professional experiences and original
interviews with leading UK practitioners working on shows such as Big Brother, Love Island
and I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, we propose to examine the “lived in reality” of
ethical discourse as it manifests on the set of some of the UK’s most high-profile
productions. Our study aims to examines the process by which ethics are mediated through
‘top-down’ producer initiatives and enacted through the often-intuitive decisions made by
those on set, offering not an evaluation of whether reality TV is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but a
framework for understanding how such notions are measured and understood within the
embodied, day-to-day labour practices of contemporary UK television production.
Alexander Sergeant is a Senior Lecturer in Film & Media Studies at the University of
Portsmouth specialising in popular film and television. He is twice nominated by BAFTSS for
his research, first as the co-editor of Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media,
Mediums and Genres (Routledge, 2018) and second for his more recent monograph
Encountering the Impossible: The Fantastic in Hollywood Fantasy Cinema (SUNY Press
2021). He is the co-founder of Fantasy-Animation.org and co-host of the Fantasy/Animation
podcast.
Evan Pugh is Deputy Course Leader and Senior Lecturer in Television production at
University of Portsmouth. Having worked in the TV industry since 2001, his first directing
role was on Big Brother in 2014, which led to working on the show for 11 years. He continues
to work as a gallery director on shows such as I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, Love
Island and more recently shows for Netflix.
Jack Shelbourn, New Naturalism and Writing a New Film Production Manifesto
‘New Naturalism isn't just about the cinematic form, but also about the films' content. A
recurring theme in Malick’s films is that human encounters with nature are transformational,
transcendent events.’ (B, 2021) The dogma of New Naturalism in its visual form, was first
defined by Terrence Malick and Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, ASC, AMC. with reference to
their film The New World (2005). This was developed further for Tree of Life (2011). More
recently It has been used to describe the cinematography of Chloe Zhao’s Oscar winning
film Nomadland (2020) by writer Benjamin B with reference to shooting only with natural
light which Zhao and cinematographer Joshua James Richards successfully achieved.
Benjamin B expanded beyond Malick and Lubezki’s visual dogma by exploring the feel and
visual dynamics of what appears on screen and ultimately how the characters are portrayed.
But by looking beyond the creative impact of the dogma an intriguing question now comes
into view.
Could New Naturalism and it’s expanded interpretation, completely without intention,
contain the formula for sustainable practices for cinematography embedded within it?
At a critical time in which we all need to make fundamental changes to our way of doing
things a manifesto devised from New Naturalism could make a positive contribution to
combatting the effects of climate change. By taking positive action now it would help
provide the next generation of film makers with a ‘manifesto’ that embraces restraint and
helps discover new creativity solutions, just as with the Dogma 95 movement of Lars von
Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Could it aid films in becoming more sustainable in the wider
sense, such as in the community and financially? And what would this new manifesto look
like? What restraints would be included or excluded? This paper aims to address these
questions by focusing on the early research conducted as part of Jack Shelbourn’s on-going
PhD.
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Jack Shelbourn is a working cinematographer and senior lecturer at the University of
Lincoln. Jack has recently begun a PhD by practice. With the working title of: Sustainable
practices in the art and craft of cinematography. Can ‘New Naturalism’, with its emphasis on
natural light, lead to more sustainable and environmentally friendly practices in
cinematography? Jack’s work as a cinematographer has won awards. Most notably Mind-
Set (2022, Dir. Mikey Murray) winning best UK feature film at the Manchester International
Film Festival 2022. Jack specialises in low budget film making, shooting with natural and
available light.
Justin Smith, Adding value to BBC IP – A sustainable approach to PSB archives

and fair use exceptions to copyright law: the case of Andrew Davies’ 1994 BBC
adaptation of Middlemarch
At last September’s BBC 100 conference, a panel of BBC archivists and historians admitted
that the Corporation is ‘divided’ internally over the contentious matter of making its vast
archival content available (even to licence-fee payers). To date, the BBC’s Written Archives
Centre at Caversham remains a delightfully arcane research facility whose content
information is only published in basic outline on its website, though it is promised that a
fully-searchable catalogue is ‘coming soon’. Much was made of the recent launch of BBC
Rewind featuring ‘over 30,000 pieces of uncovered content’ dating back to the 1940s, to
coincide with the BBC’s centenary. Yet this is selective material that has been carefully
curated.
In the decision to include in the region of 50 clips (of average duration 3 minutes) from the
BBC’s 1994 Middlemarch in our Genetic Edition, this project makes the case for fair use
exceptions to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988) under the following Sections:
29A Text and data mining exception, 32 Illustration for instruction, and 30(1) Criticism and
review. Yet BBC Legal’s advice remains that ‘Motion Gallery’s standard clip licence requires
the licensee to clear contributors/underlying rights, irrespective of whether the licensee
considers their use to be covered by FD.’ This paper argues that projects like ‘Transforming
Middlemarch’ add new value to BBC archival content by repurposing it in a freely-available
critical context, helping to celebrate the very richness of the BBC’s vast legacy. We challenge
other researchers to follow where we have dared to tread.
Justin Smith is Professor of Cinema and Television History at De Montfort University
Leicester and Visiting Professor of Media Industries at the University of Portsmouth. He is
the director of the Cinema and Television History Institute at DMU and co-director of
research in Creative and Heritage Industries. He was Principal Investigator on the AHRC-
funded projects ‘Channel 4 and British Film Culture’ (2010-14), and ‘Fifty Years of British
Music Video’ (2015-2018). He is currently PI on the AHRC project ‘Transforming
Middlemarch’ (2022-3).
David Sorfa, The Lad Meets the Existentialists: Tony Hancock, The Rebel and
Rendezvous in July
Existentialism fell out of academic fashion in the 1970s due, I suspect, to the sense that this
philosophy encouraged a crass individualism that could be mobilised to support the
introduction of neoliberal economic and political models around the world. Film theory was
taking its ideological and neo-Marxist turn around the same time and its roots in
Existentialist thought became increasingly embarrassing. At least, that’s part of the
hypothesis I am developing in a new project on film and Existentialism. In this talk, I will
consider the parodic presentation of Existentialism in Robert Day’s 1961 comedy The Rebel,
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starring the radio star Tony Hancock (perhaps now best remembered for Hancock’s Half
Hour and committing suicide in 1968). I will contrast this discussion with Jacques Becker’s
Rendezvous in July (1949) and its presentation of post-war youth culture, jazz, film students
and anthropology in post-war Paris. I would like to explore here what we might be able to
find of value in Existentialism and to begin to uncover a hidden history of film theory and
film-philosophy that might be coming back into style once again.
David Sorfa is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh and
Programme Director of the MSc and PhD in Film Studies.  He is editor-in-chief of the journal
Film-Philosophy and has written on Michael Haneke, Czech film, surrealism, belief in cinema
and the philosophical implications of point-of-view. He has particular interests in film-
philosophy, Existentialism, phenomenology, the work of Jacques Derrida and the
presentation of thought and thinking in cinema. 
Anna Sowa, “The worst thing you can do to the environment is to make a film
about it” … but it does not have to be...
About one million people in Brazil earn a meagre living by sifting through rubbish and
collecting, sorting and selling it to the country’s recycling industry. Although waste pickers
continue to face myriad challenges, in many ways the Brazilian Catadores (Portuguese
for ‘pickers’) are a success story. They are people who together raised their voices, formed
cooperatives and, in some cases, won inclusion for their group in the municipal waste
system. Through their work, Catadores do more than sustain their livelihoods—they prevent
recyclable materials from ending up in landfill, protect natural resources from use in
production, and reduce the cost of solid waste management for municipalities. This is the
theme of Chouette Films’ new i-Doc ‘Catadores: the Trailblazers’. It focuses on the story of
individuals who, despite being somewhat invisible to society, are strong and capable
entrepreneurs who are using their own initiative to improve the world they live in. Today,
the local cooperatives that they have formed are essential to the national waste system. Not
only did the theme of the film but also the process of making it pertained to environmental
sustainability. The narrative as well as the documentary genre were developed and decided
upon collaboratively with the waste pickers themselves. Drawing on the experience of
working as a film producer, supported by extensive literature review, interviews with
academics, filmmakers, festival organizers, sponsors, etc. this paper will provide a critical
reflection on questions of representation, co-creation and environmental and social
responsibility of filmmakers.
Anna Sowa is a documentary film producer at Chouette Films and PhD by practice
candidate at the London Film School/ University of Exeter. Based at SOAS, University of
London, Chouette Films fuses the worlds of academia and creativity. By harnessing the
powerful and expressive language of film, Chouette Films draws stories from the world of
academia and extends the reach of their impact to wider audiences. The vision of the
enterprise is to amplify the voices of research projects and social ventures, so that their
unique and important stories are heard rather than being lost to gather dust on library
shelves. Chouette Films is recognised for their contribution to social change and prowess
in using film to advance research, commended by the AHRC, Best Film by Research award,
the Al Jazeera International Documentary Film Festival, and the IBC Social Impact Award for
Ethical Leadership in Filmmaking, amongst many others.
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Hannah Spaulding, Remembering QUBE: Digital Afterlives, Cable, and
Sustaining “Failed” Technologies
In 1984, Warner Communications made a fateful announcement: QUBE, the interactive
cable system launched seven years before in Columbus, Ohio was shutting down. QUBE
promised subscribers a “television of tomorrow”, where they could vote in live polls,
purchase exclusive programming, take classes, and even go shopping—a fantasy that
proved too expensive and ultimately, unsustainable. Yet QUBE’s “failure” is not the end of
its story. The system helped shape television’s post-network era, developing early versions
of what would become Nickelodeon, MTV, and the Movie Channel, and anticipating
contemporary trends in digital media. More directly though, QUBE programming,
memorabilia, and technology endures, not only in official archives, but in digital spaces
documenting and reanimating QUBE’s legacy.
In this paper, I examine QUBE through the lens of sustainability, analyzing its relationship
with cable policy, histories of failure, and digital rediscovery. One the one hand, QUBE
seems an emblem of unsustainability, pointing to the broader failure of two-way cable to
live up to its Blue Sky fantasy. On the other hand, the continued efforts to re-present and
remediate QUBE in digital spaces points to the capacity for televisual and technological
failures to endure, sustain dedicated fan communities, and hold residual importance within
television history. Ultimately this paper reevaluates narratives of technological “failure”,
exploring QUBE’s digital afterlife where obsolescence does not mean erasure.
Hannah Spaulding is a Lecturer in Television Studies at the University of Lincoln. Her
research centers on histories of gender, surveillance, and domestic media. Her current book
project explores the history of “home utility television” in the United States, tracing how the
medium was used and imagined for the management and fortification of domestic life. She
holds a PhD in Screen Cultures from Northwestern University and her work has been
published in Television and New Media, the Journal of Sonic Studies, and JCMS.
James Staunton-Price, Beyond ‘Skills for a Sustainable Industry’: Socio-

ecological experiments in nonfiction filmmaking pedagogy
In recent years leading UK film industry bodies have made pronouncements towards
decarbonising the UK screen industry (albert, BFI and Arup, 2020). In practice the new role
of sustainability manager “sits comparatively low on the production hierarchy, [and] can be
powerless to put policy into operation.” (Torchin, 2022) In an effort to normalise
sustainability management, initiatives have been introduced into film school education:
checklist systems such as PEACHy (Production Environment Actions Checklist (youth)) and
standalone modules such as the ALBERT Education Partnership’s ‘Applied Skills for a
Sustainable Film Industry’.
While well-intentioned, such initiatives conform to a conception of HE that places it “at the
service of the economy and industry” (Friedman and Whitford, 2018) characterised by “a
fetishization of instrumental skills at the expense of ideas, free-thinking and an open
engagement with the world” (Petrie and Stoneman, 2014) - the neo-liberal conditions under
which filmmaking education has proliferated since New Labour. Depoliticised sustainability
training and certification become another selling-point for employability, obfuscating the
substantive change to practices and ontology that the climate and ecological catastrophes
demand.
In this presentation I give an overview of historical and contemporary pedagogical
initiatives which seek to go beyond the sustainability/skills paradigm. I argue these
initiatives, at various degrees of entanglement with mainstream higher education, provoke
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consideration of how far the extractivist global culture which has led to climate and
ecological catastrophe is engrained in the doxas of nonfiction filmmaking practice and its
education. Furthermore, they prompt deeper consideration of what conception of
nonfiction filmmaking pedagogy might be fit to respond to that catastrophe, and to what
extent that might be enacted within mainstream education.
James Staunton-Price is an AHRC (SWWDTP) PhD Researcher in anti-extractive nonfiction
filmmaking pedagogy situated between UWE Bristol and Aberystwyth. His interests include
documentary film, the film and television industries, political ecology, degrowth, new
materialism and pedagogy for social change. James’ research is informed by his experience
as a documentary filmmaker and a lecturer.
Lindsay Steenberg, Violence, Precarity, and the Warriors of Contemporary

Television
From the freelancer, to the mercenary, or the gladiator (or volunteer auctorati), the
embodied language we use to describe labour and labourers in a gig economy is often
revealingly linked to state-legitimised violence. This paper takes such language and
archetypal allegories seriously, interrogating the ties between the Roman gladiator, the
prize fighter, the Viking raider and precarious labour under contemporary capitalism.
Examples include the berserker frenzy of the Viking’s consumption in visual fictions such as
Vikings and the gladiators and celebrity fighters paid per fight in Spartacus or paid per view
in the Ultimate Fighting Championships.
I argue that the gladiators of hyper-capitalism can be functionally, if superficially, positioned
on spectrum between two different modes: the agonistic (a deadly and deadpan mode of
competition) and the ludic (a more playful and less rule-bound approach). Whilst the
gladiators of Squid Game are forced to compete to the death to clear their crippling debts,
the Roman gladiators of Spartacus are empowered by their violent skills to resist their
enslavers. What is the nature and drive that propels such competitive forces? What are the
boundaries of the games are being played and who are the players and sponsors when
violence is the main language of play? These are the research questions underpinning this
investigation of the spectrum of violent play and competition in the screen landscape of the
neoliberal labour market.
Lindsay Steenberg is Reader / Associate Professor in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes
University where she is chair of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Research Network. She
has published numerous articles on violence in the media and the crime and action genres.
She is the author of Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture: Gender,
Crime, and Science and Are You Not Entertained? Mapping the Gladiator in Visual Culture.
She is currently working on a new monograph on the fight scene with Lisa Coulthard at the
University of British Columbia.
Francesco Sticchi, Gladiatorial Games and the Exploitation of the General

Intellect: On the Success of Squid Game (2021)
More and more films and TV series address the precarisation of society, the transformation
of labour into a performance, the dynamics of human capital, and new modes of
marginalisation and exploitation. Concurrently, there is a growing interest in the analysis of
the artistic productions that address these changes and social concerns. Many times, the
cinema and television of precarity resorts to the aesthetic features of social realism, whereas,
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sci-fi dystopias and horror productions may also offer interesting and productive insights
on changing power relations though effective and imaginative allegories.
This paper aims to discuss how the extremely popular Netflix series Squid Game may
contribute in the understanding of contemporary capitalism. By displaying a series of
gladiatorial competitions in a social landscape of indebtedness and lack of future
perspectives, the series allows us, on one side, to appreciate and discuss the subject at the
centre of precarious labour; it also displays the dynamics of exploitation and extraction of
human collective intelligence (the Marxian General Intellect), the very source of capitalist
voracious and destructive growth.
Francesco Sticchi: I am Lecturer in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University, UK. Most
recently, I have published the monograph Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and
Television: Chronotopes of Anxiety, Depression, Expulsion/Extinction (Palgrave Macmillan,
2021) and works in the field of film-philosophy and ecology of media.
Sarah Street, Encounters with Colour at Denham Studios

In the 1930s Britain was one of the first non-US countries to take up Technicolor. Part of the
Prudential Assurance Company’s motivation to back Alexander Korda and the building of
Denham Studios was to develop Hillman Colour, a new colour process in Britain, and when
this did not turn out to be practicable Korda established links with the Technicolor
Corporation. Several significant Technicolor films were subsequently made at Denham, the
first British studio to produce a Technicolor feature film. The paper will consider four main
interrelated spheres: camera and lighting; sets; personnel; architecture. It explores how
colour posed challenges on account of the large, cumbersome Technicolor cameras that
very few cinematographers were trained to operate. The high-key lighting required put
physical strains on performers, lighting technicians and other studio personnel. Designing
and making sets and costumes for colour films also necessitated different protocols,
approaches and techniques. Finally, the paper will consider how colour was part of
Denham’s very fabric: since the studio’s visual records only exist as black and white
photographs and a promotional film, reconstructing the physical environment today using
VR technology presents challenges in identifying and tracing how colours looked, as well
as their function. As a working environment, colour was important at Denham for
signposting and lighting, as well as hallmarking parts of the complex’s architectural design
and ‘narrative image’. The paper describes the approach taken to re-creating the ‘lost’
colours that were part of the studio’s functioning and design.
Sarah Street is Professor of Film, University of Bristol. She has published extensively,
including British National Cinema (1997) and Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films
in the USA (2002). Her latest books are Deborah Kerr (2018); Chromatic Modernity: Color,
Cinema, and Media of the 1920s (2019, co-authored with Joshua Yumibe; winner of Kovács
book prize, SCMS 2020, and Michael Nelson prize, IAMHIST, 2021), and Colour Films in
Britain: The Eastmancolor Revolution (2021, co-authored with Keith M. Johnston, Paul Frith
and Carolyn Rickards). She is PI on the ERC Advanced Grant: STUDIOTEC: Film Studios in
Britain, France, Germany and Italy, 1930-60.
Yue Su, The (Un-)Sustainability of Food and Kinship in the Films of Kore-eda
Hirokazu
Producing and consuming food is often an everyday family practice, and through various
kinds of food, kinship can be sustained. This idea is vividly depicted in the films of the
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Japanese director, Kore-eda Hirokazu. Still Walking (2008), for instance, depicts a family
gathering in which the kitchen and dining table serve as the main stage to portray nuanced
relations between generations and households. Nobody Knows (2004) portrays the
deteriorating living standards of four abandoned children through the process of cooking
food at home, the purchase of instant food, and receipt of donations of expired food from
a convenience store (konbini). To observe how kinship can be sustained by food on different
levels, I will look at three cinematic spaces: the dining table, the kitchen, and the konbini.
Firstly, the dining table is represented as a simultaneously ordered and conflicted space,
thereby dining together is a scenario somewhere between sustainability and
unsustainability in terms of a fluid state of kinship. Secondly, the kitchen offers a space
where food can be vitalised. I suggest that the nature of producing inherent in cooking can
offer a sustainable way of kinship practice. Thirdly, the konbini, one of the most ubiquitous
nodes in Japan’s urban network, offers essential products for living, including cooked food.
As Nobody Knows illustrates, it has been a surrogate dining-kitchen area for numerous
people living in Japan (Whitelaw, 2018). I will argue that the instantaneity and
unsustainability of the konbini food increases the level of risk in lived forms of kinship.
Yue Su is a PhD student in the Co-Tutelle PhD Programme in Global Screen Studies between
the University of Warwick and Nagoya University in Japan. His research interests lie in the
fields of the cinematic representation of kinship, World cinema, and queer cinema. His PhD
project concerns the idea of ‘liquid kinship’ in the films of Kore-eda Hirokazu.
Dyna Herlina Suwarto, Creative Hustle as Coping Practice of Precarity among

Local Filmmakers
The Yogyakarta independent filmmakers experience precariousness that rooted to the
industrial informality and lack of workers protection regulation. Filling the research gap
about precarity in the informal media context, this study explores about production practice
of the local film practitioners amidst the precariousness. Drawing from the qualitative
approach that involves 23 interviewees, it reveals that they conduct creative hustle practices
include dual lives, relational work and speculative action. Most of the film practitioners work
for multiple jobs that categorized into passionate and commissioned project. Furthermore,
they rely on interpersonal relationship to move from one project to another through
hanging around and helping about practices. To maintain and develop their career in the
film industry they keep working and hoping in flexible manner. The creative hustle practices
enforce the self-resilience towards precarity without change the fundamental causes.
Dyna Herlina Suwarto is a Ph.D. student in the film and television studies programme, at
the University of Nottingham and a member of teaching staff at the Universitas Negeri
Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She is a co-founder of Jogja Netpac Asian Film Festival, Indonesian
Film Studies (KAFEIN) and Cinema House (Rumah Sinema) in Indonesia. Her research
interest is related to media industries.
Juan A. Tarancón, Break On Through to the Other Side: Roberto Minervini and
the Challenge of Hope
The effects of the various interconnected crises of the last two decades include a
transformation of the ways in which feelings are organized and distributed. Estranged from
the new socioeconomic landscape and pessimistic about the possibilities of holding back
the tide of developments, many people had recourse to an us-versus-them mindset. What
is perhaps most startling is that we all naturalized the simplistic narrative that divides society
into two irreconcilable cultural tribes, thus precluding any resolution other than total
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annihilation. In a context marked by pessimism, cynicism, and political polarization, being
strategic about mobilizing hope may be one way of moving beyond an interpretative
framework that has contributed to division and social stagnation, prompting both camps to
endlessly harden and radicalize their positions. I aim to show that Roberto Minervini’s
approach to filmmaking rests on an effort to transcend rigid categories and disturb our
certainties about the current political situation. I will argue that his films challenge spectators
to pay heed to the feelings and the sense of reality of those who think differently about the
forces that are transforming society and urge us to reconstruct the current context as one
of community, relationality, and care.
Juan A. Tarancón is Lecturer in Film Studies and Cultural Studies in the Department of
English at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. He has written on film genre theory, on
representations of immigration and Mexican American culture, and on the work of
filmmakers like John Sayles and Carlos Saura. His work has appeared in CineAction, Cultural
Studies, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, New Cinemas, and varied Spanish scholarly
journals. He is the co-editor of Global Genres, Local Films: The Transnational Dimension of
Spanish Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Screening the Crisis: US Cinema and Social
Change in the Wake of the 2008 Crash (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Sarah Thomas, Trust, authenticity and agency in the celebrity digital double
This paper examines the replication of star identity into celebrity ‘digital doubles’ in order
to consider how virtual celebrity is being used to shape important emergent parameters
around trust in the digital body. To producers of synthetic media (like the digital human or
AI-produced content) the celebrity digital double can act as a signifier of responsible
agency and ethical approaches of these new digital forms; yet for others, they are also
significant symbols of artifice and illegitimacy. I will explore the process of turning known
personalities, performances and images into digital language, capturing and curating a
fixed star image, especially those that use volumetric capture, hologrammatic projection
and AI-software. I will examine how the marketing of these digital imaginaries shape
alternate perspectives around the authenticities of stardom and tech-driven/star-driven
storytelling. I will also discuss the impact of digital doubling on celebrity and performative
agency, where – on the one hand –unions like SAG-AFTRA and Equity are campaigning
against exploitation and negotiating for improved performer digital rights management,
and – on the other - celebrities themselves engage in increasingly visible ‘virtualisation
strategies’ where their digital replication expands their brand identity and asset value.
Through this, I will consider how some examples of the celebrity digital double, including
avatars of David Beckham, Abba and David Attenborough, act as a means by which
consumers are encouraged to learn to ‘trust’ a seemingly safe and ethical digital
environment, whereby the presence of star image and performance appears to reconcile
some of the long-standing issues about the replication of digital identity.
Sarah Thomas is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of
Liverpool. Specialising in research on the Hollywood film industry, stardom, and immersive
media, she is author of the Peter Lorre - Face Maker: Constructing Stardom in Hollywood
and Europe (Berghahn 2012) and James Mason for the BFI Film Stars series (BFI Bloomsbury
2018), co-author of ‘Using Eye Tracking and Raiders of the Lost Ark to Investigate Stardom
and Performance’ in Dwyer et al (eds.), Seeing Into Screen: Eye tracking the Moving Image
(Bloomsbury 2018), and ‘The Star in VR’ (Celebrity Studies Journal 2019).
Lizzie Thynne, A feminist revisioning of British Documentary history

What does an attention to the work of early women non-fiction film-makers tell us about
how documentary history might be re-visioned and diversified?
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What might looking outside the circle of Grierson’s boys reveal about how factual film was
being developed by women in other sectors and contexts?
Using examples from films by women who worked outside the Documentary Movement,
including those on the recent BFI DVD collection of archival restorations, The Camera is
Ours: Britain’s Women Documentary Makers (2022), Thynne will present some initial
responses to these questions looking at how selected directors such as Sarah Erulkar, Muriel
Box, Kay Mander and Evelyn Spice contributed to the form and development of non-fiction
film. Often working in what were less visible and certainly less prestigious genres in the
1930s and 1940s such as the information film they were able to exploit the medium to
explore new subjects and to address aspects of women’s daily experiences which were
side-lined in many films of the Documentary Movement which focussed on men at work.
Lizzie Thynne is a documentary film-maker and Professor of Film at the University of Sussex.
Her recent biopic, Independent Miss Craigie (2021), a special feature on The Camera is Ours
dvd (BFI, 2022), explores the career and life of director Jill Craigie, (1911 - 99) whose
innovative films are re-evaluated in the AHRC project led by Thynne, Jill Craigie: Film
Pioneer. Thynne’s other feature documentaries On the Border, Playing a Part: the Story of
Claude Cahun and Brighton: Symphony of a City have been widely screened at international
festivals and major galleries.
Muriel Tinel-Temple, Digital Landscapes: movements and metamorpheses in

the work of Jacques Perconte
Jacques Perconte is a French visual artist. He works in digital, mainly filming places,
landscapes, and territories, and then manipulating the compressed files by using his own
homemade techniques of data-moshing. Although deeply digital, Perconte’s work is
grounded in the real and in the materiality of the explored area, hence a strange and
unsettling encounter between the organic, the mineral, and the digital.
Because he constantly returns and re-films the same places, he talks about them as ‘friends’
you visit, and he is more interested in recording a ‘moment’ of/in the landscapes and letting
it to be revealed later, than he is in controlling and imposing a point of view on it. By playing
with the limits of visibility, revealing traces of movements, textures, lights, colours and
shapes, and resisting the idea of the ‘spectacular’, he situates himself in opposition to the
mainstream (and damaging) drone-high-definition overview of our planet.
For this paper I would like to focus on two points:
Using notions of human geography and performing landscapes (as developed by John
Wylie), but also the concept of ‘Metamorphoses’ developed by the philosopher
Emmanuele Coccia, I will discuss Perconte’s relationship to the natural world, seen and
understood as a continuous (digital) transformation, reassessing endlessly ‘our’ place within
it.
Then, drawing upon Sean Cubitt’s work in The Practice of Light (2014), I will analyse
Perconte’s uses of mostly unpredicted movements, light and recurrent colours to explore
the way nature, culture and techniques are intertwined and interdependent.
Muriel Tinel-Temple is Lecturer in Film and Digital Content Creation, University of
Roehampton. She mainly teaches ‘critical practice’, and her research explores experimental
filmmaking, found footage/archive-based films, self-representation, Francophone cinemas
and mediated landscapes. She is the author of Le cinéaste au travail: autoportraits (2016),
co-editor of From Self-Portrait to Selfie: Representing the Self in the Moving Image (2019),
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and she recently published ‘Found Footage and the Construction of the Self: Dream English
Kid 1964-1999 AD and Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream’ (Ekphrasis, 2021). She organises
screenings at Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, including ‘Jacques Perconte: Digital
Landscapes’.
Christa van Raalte, Rowan Aust and Richard Wallis, Where have all the PMs
gone? The importance of sustainable working environments in addressing
persistent skills gaps in UK TV
The UK television industry has for years reported skills shortages impeding both quality of
output and global competitiveness (ScreenSkills June 2022). The situation has recently
been exacerbated by the influx of funding from streaming companies. The demand for high
quality content represents a great growth opportunity for the industry; shortages of
experienced, skilled professionals in key roles, however, represents a very real risk to our
ability to respond to that opportunity and indeed to the sustainability of the British industry.
The skills that consistently head the lists of shortages reported by organisations such as
ScreenSkills, the BFI and the Work Foundation are those of experienced production
managers (PMs) (eg ScreenSkills Feb 2022; ScreenSkills Sept 2022). The industry struggles
to recruit to the role: more significantly, perhaps, it fails to retain the experienced PMs it has.
This failure not only represents a level of wastage the industry can ill afford, it also represents
a very human cost for those leaving the industry. Existing evidence suggests that for PMs,
as for other television professionals the decision to abandon their careers is not taken lightly
and is often taken with regret (Wallis et al 2019; Wreyford et al 2021). They take from the
industry the skills and experience that are in short supply, because they feel the industry has
left them no choice.
This British Academy funded project explores the lived experiences of people working in
production management roles, and, particularly, of those who have left the industry. We
seek to understand what the industry can do to retain critical talent. This paper will present
our preliminary findings from the study.
Christa van Raalte is Associate Professor of Film and Television at Bournemouth University.
Her research interests include constructions of gender in action cinema, narrative strategies
in complex TV, and working conditions in the film and television industries. She has recently
published articles on these topics in journals including the New Review for Film and
Television Studies, the Journal of Popular Film and Television and Media industries, as well
as a number of book chapters and industry reports.
Rowan Aust is Lecturer in Television Production and Industries at the University of
Huddersfield. An ex-television Producer, she is also C-Director of Share My Telly Job, which
advocates for parity in television work through better management of hours. Her research
interests are in the lived experience of TV and film workers and regimes and ethics of care.
Richard Wallis is Principal Academic at Bournemouth University’s Faculty of Media &
Communication and a member of the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice (CEMP). His
research and writing is primarily focused on media work and employment, media literacy
and effective pedagogies for the preparation of young people aspiring to work within
media industries. He was previously an Executive Producer within the Twofour Group where
he served on the Board of Twofour Communications. He holds an MPhil from Exeter
University and a PhD from Loughborough University.
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María A. Vélez-Serna, Anti-infrastructural media: Reuse and detournement of
sponsored film in environmental conflicts
This paper explores the use of audiovisual media to facilitate and to contest infrastructure
projects, with a focus on extraction and energy transitions in Colombia. Starting from archive
research on corporate and industrial film of opencast coal mining, I argue that the visibility
of infrastructure is mobilised in environmental conflicts through the use and
reappropriation of moving images.
As Campos Johnson (2018) has argued, visuality can be infrastructural, mediating
relationships between things; in this way, audiovisual media participate in the production
of material relations, such as the construction of roads, mines, ports, and dams. Sponsored
media, including industrial and public relations film, training and corporate
communications video, state-funded television, and online campaigns, make infrastructure
visible to persuade stakeholders, explain processes, and coordinate activities. This limited
visibility can become a site of contestation when environmental conflicts arise from
infrastructure projects. Activists and affected communities also use audiovisual media to
propose competing visions of progress and relationships to land. In activist media, clips
from sponsored media can be turned against themselves, used as evidence or contrasted
with on-the-ground realities and testimonies.
My research seeks to understand some of the motivations and strategies through which
independent media producers appropriate and recontextualise sponsored film and video
in disputes about mine expansion, hydroelectric dams, and windfarms. From a climate
justice perspective, it asks whether there are other ways of looking at infrastructure besides
the technological sublime, and whether infrastructural cinema can be put to other uses.
María A. Vélez-Serna teaches film and media at the University of Stirling. She is the author
of Ephemeral Cinema Spaces (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), and co-author of Early
Cinema in Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). She has also published on archive
film reuse, early film distribution and showmanship, and on Colombian films and audiences
of the 1940s. She studied at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the University of
Glasgow.
Jaime Vindel, The dam as cinematographic Atlante: hegemony,

hydroelectricity and ecological sensitivity in the Italian film production of the
economic miracle
During the post-war decades in Italy (and more particularly between 1958 and 1963),
developmentalism took on the dimension of a miracle in the narratives of political and
economic power, aimed at leaving behind both material poverty and the historical trauma
suffered by the nation as a result of fascism and the civil war that took place during the
Second World War. One of the symbols of this period was the construction of Alpine dams
for the production of hydroelectric energy, which were to guarantee the supply of the large
Italian cities. Dams as the Atlantes of progress became a narrative starting-point around
which to generate new hegemonic discourses, as in the films made for Edison Volta by
Ermanno Olmi. But the imaginaries of the dam also welcomed a more ambiguous vision of
industrialism in films that reflected the impact on natural ecosystems, as in Manon-finestra
2 (1956), filmed by Olmi himself with a poetic script by Pier Paolo Pasolini. These and other
films of the period announced a tension between the interests of the energy corporations,
the political hegemony of Christian Democracy, Pasolini's conversion of the anti-fascist ethic
into anti-industrialism and the propaganda apparatus of organizations such as the Italian
Socialist Party and the Italian Communist Party, in a context in which the "economic miracle"
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saw its hydroelectric utopia crack after the Vajont dam disaster in 1963. Finally, the paper
will underline how the end of this hydroelectric utopia coincided with the emergence of a
new fossil modernity around the development of prospecting promoted by ENI (Ente
Nazionale Idrocarburi), which had its documentary translation in a controversial
documentary filmed by Joris Ivens in 1960.
Jaime Vindel holds an European PhD in Art History. He is post-doctoral Researcher of the
Institute of History of the Spanish National Research Council, where he is Head Researcher
of the projects: "Fossil Aesthetics: a political ecology of art history, visual culture and cultural
imaginaries of modernity" and “Energy humanities. Energy and sociocultural imaginaries
between the industrial revolutions and the ecosocial crisis”. He was coordinator of the
"Cultural Ecologies" contents block of the Independent Studies Programme of the Museum
of Contemporary Art of Barcelona and is the author of books such as Estética fósil.
Imaginarios de la energía y crisis ecosocial (Arcadia, 2020).
Ed Vollans, Accidental archives and paratextuality

As a commodity sold for economic gain, commercial videogames require promotion: from
flyers for new cabinet-sized arcade machines, early television advertisements explaining
how to connect the console to the TV, right the way through to contemporary pre-roll
YouTube adverts and trailers. As with all promotional paratexts, studying this kind of
industrial communication provides a lens through which we can view both the product, and
the wider concerns of the industry. We can see how the product was presented, how the
product’s audience was positioned, constructed, and ultimately how the consumer was
communicated with alongside context – games ratings, formats, even the representation (or
not) of players. Recognising the value of promotion, work in games studies has engaged
with the concept of paratexts as a separate framing device, one suitable for historic study
(e.g Young, 2007, Therrien & Lefebvre 2017), and has seen archives generated for academic
purposes therein. In this paper, Vollans revisits and reviews one of the first open academic
archives of digital game promotion, published in thesis form in 2010, just how much
longevity and use does a simple PhD thesis have a decade later, and what might this mean
for future studies?  
Exploring the disparity and challenges between accessibility then, and over a decade later,
this paper draws together key themes exploring the challenges in generating and
maintaining paratextual archives for the purposes of historical study. It reflects on the nature
of ephemera within the archive, and the cultural status of promotional ephemera
specifically, while offering practical reflections on data management, and the overall
sustainability of academic self-archival projects.
Ed Vollans is a Lecturer in Media & Advertising at the University of Leicester. He attained
his PhD, focusing on promotional trailers and contemporary media industries from the
University of East Anglia in 2015. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, and has
worked in a number of HE institutions within the UK. Prior to academia he worked for UKRI,
and as a Journalist for Screen, Indian Express. His research explores promotion within the
contemporary entertainment industries, and the implications of industry change on
promotion.
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Verena von Eicken, Levelling the playing field – Enabling learning on gender
and politics for film students
How can Film Studies enable learning on representation, gender and identity politics at a
time of social upheaval? The 2020s are an exciting, rewarding time to be working with film
students on the topic of representation and identity: increased media awareness and
discussion of ongoing inequalities of people due to their ethnicity, gender identity or socio-
economic background has taken off through social media initiatives such as #metoo,
#blacklivesmatter or #oscarssowhite. The MeToo movement, closely related to the
Weinstein scandal that exposed the rampant misogyny and sexual abuse in the film industry
has gained strength from individuals taking the courage to speak up about their
experiences of victimisation and empowerment. The polarisation of political camps and rise
of extreme right wing politicians in the 2010s has thrown into relief a social rift along lines
of gender, race and class: fourth wave feminist activists and other interest groups
campaigning for greater visibility and social equality, have been propelled into action by
the public figures blatantly abusing their power, from the deep-seated misogyny and
sexism of extreme Donald Trump and his supporters, police violence against people of
colour in the US, to the xenophobic politics of Suella Braverman, the accusations of racism
within the British monarchy and the evident disconnect of conservative British politicians
from the people they were elected to represent.
In this paper, I will discuss how teaching on modules on the representation of gender and
identity in film since starting out as a seminar tutor in 2011, I have learnt as much from
working with my students as I have aimed to bring to them. I have worked with groups of
students with widely diverging levels of knowledge and interest in discussing these issues
of identity and representation: the fact that they are so closely related to students’ personal
experience is a major asset, as it invites students’ engagement – and, at the same time, a
challenge, since students yet have to find their voice and confidence to express their
position and identity when undertaking an undergraduate degree. I will reflect on how
working closely with students on these fundamental, equally personal and highly socially
relevant topics has motivated me to continually develop and update my curriculum:
choosing case study films and academic texts as focal points for discussion, I have had to
reflect on my own biases and privilege arising from my background and education.
Selecting materials, tasks and activities based on students’ input, I have drawn of a range of
teaching materials such as new film texts, mediatised events and academic publications
alike. Specifically, I will discuss the usefulness of postmodernist ideas and texts due to their
approach to (his)tory/herstory as personal, subjective and empowering storytelling; and
how the semiotics tenet that ‘language creates truth’ is crucial in situating developments in
naming and declaring aspects of gender, sexual and ethnic identity (such as the appeal that
the designation of a ‘non-binary’ gender identity has to many millennials). In so doing, I
hope to contribute to a reflection and discussion on how the academy can present complex
ideas around identity, power and empowerment in an accessible, inclusive way.
Verena von Eicken is a Senior Lecturer at Falmouth University‘s School of Film and
Television, where she also researches on gender in film and television, history in film and
contemporary German Cinema. Among her forthcoming publications is a chapter entitled
‘Visualising heritage in period drama – A case study of Beloved Sisters (dir. Dominik Graf,
2014)’ that is part of a conference publication of the (IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S) 2022
Canterbury Conference. Verena studied Film and TV Studies at the University of York, where
she completed her PhD, ‘German Actresses of the 2000s - A Study of Female
Representation, Acting and Stardom’ in 2015.
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Harry Warwick, Cathedral of Power: Battersea Power Station in Dystopian
Visual Culture
Once an avatar of social and economic progress, the coal-fired power station has become
the emblem of deindustrialisation and decline. Launching the Conservative party’s 2010
manifesto in the long-defunct Battersea Power Station – which at its peak supplied as much
as a fifth of London’s electricity – David Cameron exploited this very association: Battersea
Power Station, he claimed, is ‘a building in need of regeneration in a country in need of
regeneration’. Cameron appears to have got his wish: its redevelopment funded by a
consortium of Malaysian firms, the erstwhile power station is now a complex of luxury
apartments, offices, and shops. By contrast with Cameron’s gentrified pseudo-utopia,
however, this paper turns to the history of dystopian representations of Battersea Power
Station, particularly those produced in the period of the building’s dereliction. The paper
begins with a reading of the famous depiction of the building on the cover art of Pink Floyd’s
album Animals (1977), which industrialises Orwell’s agricultural allegory in Animal Farm
(1945); compares this artwork with Michael Radford’s cinematic Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1984), in which the power station coincides directly with authoritarian power; and
concludes by examining Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), whose ‘reproductive
futurism’ is also a fossil futurism – a vision of the future dependent on the heat and light of
fossil fuels. The power station embodies not only our social hopes and dreams, this paper
contends, but also our fears.
Harry Warwick is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of English and
Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. His first monograph, Dystopia
and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science-Fiction Film, 1979–2017, is forthcoming with
Liverpool University Press in March 2023.
Liz Watkins, Colourisation, Ethics and the Archive: attending to the dead.
This presentation examines the aesthetics of digitally colourised photochemical images—
the selection of hues, their application, and effect on the viewer’s perception of the image—
for the ethical implications of the technique as it has been used to interpret and exhibit
photochemical records from the First World War. Examples include the work of
Dynamichrome for The Big Show, IWM North, They Shall Not Grow Old (Peter Jackson,
2018), and the images colourised by Marina Amaral for All the World Aflame (2020) and A
Woman’s World (2022). Colourisation describes the retrospective digitisation and addition
of colour to analogue photographs that were originally recorded in a black-and-white
format.
The use of colourisation has met with popular public reception, yet has incited polemical
debate around the issues of authorship, artistic expression, ownership, and for the rhetoric
of restoration surrounding ‘colourisation’ projects that conversely overwrite the historical
specificity and indexicality of photographic materials and practices. Blurring, overexposure
to light, and decay are not necessarily an obstruction to viewing experience, but integral to
understanding the complex histories of photochemical images, their production, circulation
and storage. Further, the addition of colour is able to emphasise or diminish details that
were considered salient to the photographer. If colourisation implements a new visual
hierarchy, might it infer a link to moral values in the history and representation of violence
and loss? Amaral writes that colour acts as an ‘emotional enhancing agent’ (2020) able to
emphasise empathy, anxiety or disgust, yet as archivists note, photochemical film and
colour is susceptible to fading and deterioration in ‘the way of all flesh tones’ (Cherchi Usai
1991), its decay signalling ‘a loss of coherence of the body’ (Marks 2000). This presentation
explores the ways in which colour and marks of decay might accentuate (or diminish)
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viewer’s pain and/or empathy (Sontag 2003) in relation to an image or event of which the
spectator has no personal memory (Hammond 2011; Russell 2016), yet is able to recognize
and empathize with the plight of the person on screen. It examines the ways in which
filmmakers and artists who digitally clean and colourise archival photographs and films
attend to the dead (Odumosu 2020), vulnerable, and wounded to consider the ways that
colourisation intersects with how we know the past through historical images (Crane 2008).
Liz Watkins Research Fellow, University of Leeds: My research interests include colour, its
theories, technologies, and materiality in photographic and film archives. I am Chair of the
British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies and I have held research
fellowships at the National Maritime Museum Greenwich and Harry Ransom Research
Center, University of Texas at Austin. My publications include essays in Screen, Journal for
Cultural Research, photographies and Parallax. I have co-edited books on Color and the
Moving Image (Routledge, 2013), British Colour Cinema (Bloomsbury 2013) and Gesture
and Film: Signalling New Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2017).
Alan Watt, Morality and hypermorality in film storytelling: Abel Ferrara’s Bad
Lieutenant (1992)
There is a danger that a narrow view of ethics, conceived as following an objective moral
standard that excludes evil, leads to an equally narrow understanding of film’s potential to
explore the ethical, highlighting only films which exemplify and endorse the approved
ethical standards. By opening up to less orthodox philosophical approaches, however, it
becomes possible to appreciate the ethical significance of films that trouble the
relationship between good and evil and do not simply endorse commonplace conceptions
of the good. This paper takes such an approach, highlighting the idea of ‘hypermorality’ as
proposed by Georges Bataille in Literature and Evil: whereas conventional morality would
insist on upholding the moral law (taboo) at all times, hypermorality rather insists on the
necessity and value of larger patterns of taboo, transgression and atonement, and on art’s
capacity to highlight such patterns and engage the ‘complicity’ of audiences in
experiencing them. While Bataille applied this theory to the medium of literature in analysis
of writers such as Emily Brontë and William Blake, this paper will consider its possible
application to film through a detailed analysis of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992). At
the micro level, the paper argues that this film does indeed fit the ‘hypermorality’ pattern
outlined by Bataille, indicating that his ideas can be usefully applied to cinema. More
broadly, I argue the need to incorporate hypermorality into our understanding of ethics,
which in turn means affirming the vital importance of transgressive cinema to any serious
conversation about ethical film futures.
Alan Watt is a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh Film Studies department,
where he is conducting research on tragedy and the post-classical American Western;
previously he taught for two decades at Central European University, Budapest. He holds
an MA in Film Studies from Kingston University and a PhD in philosophy from the University
of Warwick, where he specialised in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Besides work
on Nietzsche his publications include studies of other modern European philosopers
including Jacques Rancière and Georges Bataille, and his current research interests include
explorations of the interface between film and philosophy.
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Andrew Watts, Sustainability, Survival, and (Mis)Remembering the Canon:
Adapting Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
This paper explores the idea of sustainability in relation to the ongoing adaptation of
canonical works of literature. More specifically, it considers how the ways in which we
remember texts survive and evolve through the practice of adaptation. The paper focuses
on Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and incorporates analysis of key adaptations of
the novel in silent film (Huckleberry Finn, 1920, dir. Taylor), television (The New Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn, 1968-69), and Japanese Manga (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
2017). My discussion places these adaptations in dialogue with the concept of adaptive
memory first elaborated by James Nairne, Sarah, Thompson, and Josefa Pandeirada in
2007. In the context of evolutionary psychology, their research argues that humans use
memory not simply to recall past events, but to improve their fitness for reproduction. This
paper examines how adaptations of Huckleberry Finn have remembered the novel at
different historical moments, often responding to debates around racism, censorship, and
what Bourdieu has theorised as wider structures of power and social inequality. Moreover,
it reflects on how adaptations can create ‘false memories’ of their source material, deliberate
or unconscious ‘misrememberings’ of the text which help to perpetuate its artistic afterlife.
In summary, this paper demonstrates that, through the mechanisms of memory, the practice
of creative adaptation does not remain static, but sustains and reinvents itself over time.
Andrew Watts is Reader in French Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK). He is the
author and co-author of several books on nineteenth-century French literature and its
adaptation across multiple media, including Adapting Nineteenth-Century France (UWP,
2013) and The History of French Literature on Film (Bloomsbury, 2020), both with Kate
Griffiths. He is currently working on a new monograph for Legenda entitled Darwinian
Dialogues: Adaptation, Evolution, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, and a special issue of
the Balzac Review / Revue Balzac on the theme of adaptation.
Nick Webber, The paratextual past – relating histories of game experience to

game texts
What survives when a game is completed or set aside, or paused mid-play but (perhaps
unintentionally) never resumed? Of non-digital role-playing games, Anders Drachen and
colleagues (2009: 3) observe that ‘each participant has memories of the game from their
character’s point-of-view, in addition to an assortment of props’. Souvik Mukherjee (2015:
104, 118) extends this, adding After Action Reports, Let’s Plays and reviews to the
paratextual materials which preserve this ‘“disappearing” game narrative’, and are essential
to the experience of video-game stories. 
This paper is concerned with paratextual material of this kind which is produced by players
and which historicises game experiences. It reflects on a series of questions about the
textual and paratextual nature of these artefacts, and their relationship both to the game
text and a sense of the past. If history represents The Past as Text (Spiegel, 1997), how does
paratextuality function between two equivalent textual authorities? As histories of game
experiences are not usually produced by people we might think of as game ‘authors’, we
might argue that they are not paratexts at all (see Genette, 1991: 262). Yet many game
‘authors’ subsequently integrate these histories into the text (or paratext): through a saved
game which shapes a New Game+, an in-game marker which recalls an emergent event, or
promotional media which retells players’ stories of their gameplay. This paper discusses
these complexities, and offers insight into the relationship between games, history, text and
paratext.
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Nick Webber is Associate Professor in Media, and Director of the Birmingham Centre for
Media and Cultural Research, at Birmingham City University, UK. He is co-convenor of the
Historical Games Network and his research focuses on (video)games, cultural history and
identity. His recent work explores the historical practices of player and fan communities, the
impact of games and virtual worlds on our understanding of the past, and the relationship
between national cultural policy and video games.
Guy Westwell, Sustainable Futures From Past Lives: Ghandi (1982), Rosa

Luxemburg (1986), A Hidden Life (2013) and the Peace Biopic
Certain films – what might be called peace biopics – tell the story of individuals seeking
peace in a violent world. This paper focuses on three examples: Ghandi (Richard
Attenborough, 1982), Rosa Luxemburg (Margarethe von Trotta, 1986), and A Hidden
Life (Terence Malick, 2013). The films’ stories are varied, recounting lives devoted to
religious pacifist activism, secular anti-war pacifism, and religious conscientious objection.
However, what the films have in common is a desire to identify, depict and celebrate
alternative, or against the grain, ways of living. The paths taken by the films’ protagonists,
and the films themselves, point to the possibility of a more peaceful, and as a consequence,
more sustainable future. Two key lines of inquiry are explored. First, how the films foster the
imagination of a more sustainable future from the story of past lives while working within
the significant limits of the biopic genre and its avowed commitment to individual human
experience and the timeframe of a life. Second, how the films invite ethical thought via their
varied cinematic engagements with individuals who refuse to be conform to social norms,
inherited values, and the status quo, and instead seek alternatives, even in the face of
imprisonment, violent repression, the seeming impossibility of change, and the threat of
death.
Guy Westwell is Reader in Film Studies and Head of Film at Queen Mary University of
London. He is the author of War Cinema – Hollywood on the Front-line (Wallflower Press,
2006) and Parallel Lines: Post-9/11 American Cinema (Wallflower Press, 2012), and co-
author with Annette Kuhn of The Oxford Dictionary of Film Studies (Oxford University Press,
2020). His current research focuses on the war and anti-war film, and peace cinema.
Abigail Whittall, Examining Guillermo Del Toro’s Monsters: Labour, Visibility

and the Practical Effects Makeup Actor
The practical effects makeup actor has a long history in cinema, with notable early examples
including Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff. These actors have been deemed stars at least in
part due to their ability to perform under heavy makeup and prosthetics as monsters with
little to no human resemblance, posing an unusual form of stardom. While there has been
a shift towards digital effects within contemporary cinema, practical effects are far from
obsolete, and they remain particularly important within the fantasy and horror genres. The
work of Guillermo del Toro provides a useful case study as he has been noted for his
continued use of practical effects, and has employed the same practical effects makeup
actors multiple times: Doug Jones, Brian Steele and Javier Botet.
The discourse surrounding such practical effects makeup actors draws our attention
towards recurring themes such as the (in)visibility of the actor, the value of performance and
the physical discomfort of practical effects. This paper thus considers both the specific
contemporary circumstances of these practical effects makeup actors and connects them
to the legacy of earlier stars in order to understand better their working conditions and
industry status. Underpinning this examination is an ethical concern surrounding the
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treatment of the practical effects makeup actor, and so this paper aims to bring to light how
these actors may be exploited or mistreated due to their unique role.
Abigail Whittall is a Post Doctoral Teaching Fellow in Film at the University for the Creative
Arts. She completed her PhD at the University of Winchester where she has taught both Film
and English Literature. Her research frequently considers horror and the Gothic across a
range of contemporary media, and connects these genres to their cultural contexts.
Christina Wilkins, Truth, Self-hood, and Adaptation in Westworld

Despite the recent shifts to the digital, the physical matters more than ever. We see this in
interviews with actors who voice animated characters, actors who voice CGI characters, and
actors who voice other non-human characters. Many things present a challenge to the ways
in which we understand the physical - the structures of meaning in the world primarily,
along with the specific filmic ways we understand star bodies. These combine to create
barriers to 'seeing' the truth of a character we might think, but this is fixated on an approach
that privileges a hierarchy of actor over character. Equally, it is one that privileges body over
character. The recent series of Westworld begins to challenge this, thinking about the ways
in which whilst the physical may be required, audiences are able to think beyond it. It
functions as a way to consider the digital adaptation of the self, and the return to the needs
of the physical to express character. Ultimately, this paper argues that although we cannot
escape the physical, the hierarchies and boundaries we have in place for understanding the
truth of the self remain as unfixed as ever, despite the recourse to adapting through non-
physical means.
Christina Wilkins is an early-career researcher in film and literature, specialising in
adaptations. She has published on mental health, nostalgia, the body, stardom, and queer
identities. Her book, Embodying Adaptation: Character and the Body, was released through
Palgrave in August 2022. She currently teaches at the University of Birmingham.
Megan Wilson, "I know about an all-woman world": Embodying equity and
intimacy in Portrait of a Lady on Fire's lesbian imaginary
This paper considers the future of lesbian visibility in popular cinema vis-à-vis the current
prosperity of the “lesbian period drama”, a genre which might paradoxically entomb its
screen presence in the past. In an interview promoting Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019),
writer-director Céline Sciamma criticised the avoidance of the term “lesbian” in popular
discourse surrounding her film (Aguilar, 2020). This year, a special issue of the Journal of
Lesbian Studies posed the question: “Is lesbian identity obsolete?” (26:1, 2022). Indicative
of more general apprehensions about the future of this identity category and the limits of
its affective and political attachments, this question pushes up against Sciamma’s assertion
of the specificity of “lesbian” as a legible marker in her filmmaking. To navigate this
discursive tension, I propose a close reading of Portrait that explores the generative
potential of Sciamma’s self-described “lesbian imaginary” to construct a cinematic time-
space of refuge from, and resistance to, patriarchy. This reading approaches three integral
constructs within Portrait’s “lesbian imaginary”: the dissolution of the artist’s male gaze; the
slow temporality and environmental motifs that signify the “rise of desire”; and the
embodiment of women’s community and caregiving within the film’s domestic and pastoral
spaces. In doing so, I also draw out the tensions that proliferate around theories of the
female or lesbian gaze, and troubling the very definition of lesbian “visibility” without
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yielding to the desire to naturalise it, a theoretical problem exacerbated by the demands of
contemporary inclusion and representation politics.
Megan Wilson (she/they) is a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester. Her research
maps the cinematic imaginaries and discursive formations of the “lesbian period drama” in
film and television, amidst an apparently paradoxical moment for lesbian identity: feared
obsolescence and heightened cultural visibility. Megan holds a BA in Film Studies from
King’s College London, and a MA in Gender, Sexuality & Culture from the University of
Manchester. Her first publication, “Food, Consumption and Queer Subjectivity in
Contemporary American Cinema,” can be found in the edited collection Queering Nutrition
and Dietetics: LGBTQ+ Reflections on Food Through Art (Routledge, 2022).
Faye Woods, Death of a matriarch: EastEnders soap opera space and aesthetics
This paper explores how EastEnders presented the deaths of its three major matriarchs, Pat,
Peggy and Dot across the last 10 years. I’m interested in these events intertwining of deep
narrative with the spaces of Albert Square, both public and domestic in episodes featuring
and surrounding these matriarchs’ deaths. Here the layered memories attached to soap
space are mobilised to produce an affective experience that hails long-time viewers and
pays tribute to these characters’ and actresses’ impact. Long-running elderly characters
embody soap memory, and through these deaths EastEnders revisited layers of its past and
beyond. These episodes also saw aesthetic choices shift the soap’s conventional practices
in ways that drew attention to the Square’s geography and domestic spaces.
In long-running soap operas like EastEnders, with their standing backlot sets, both domestic
and exterior public spaces become as familiar to viewers as their own homes. This familiarity
and the programme’s ‘invisible’ continuity editing allows these spaces to fall into the
background, servicing character interaction and emotion, the daily rhythms of soap
narrative. The matriarch deaths were large-scale ‘event’ examples of EastEnders’ periodic
disruption of established aesthetic and spatial conventions to heighten a moment’s
emotional impact, heightening the melodrama of British soap’s social realist melodrama.
This paper will explore how these episodes/arcs foreground soap memory’s intertwining of
narrative and space. Here, these women’s multiple layers of narrative past were integrated
with the spaces of the square. In doing so EastEnders refines the complex and unwieldy
narrative history of its long-running characters to produce moments of closure in its ever-
onwards narrative.
Faye Woods is Associate Professor of Film and Television at the University of Reading. She
is the author of Period Drama (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), British Youth Television
(Palgrave, 2016), and co-author of An Introduction to Television Studies, 4th Edition
(Routledge, 2022). Her work also appears in the journals Communication, Culture and
Critique, Journal of British Cinema and Television, Critical Studies in Television and Television
& New Media, as well as the edited collections Transatlantic Television Drama, From
Networks to Netflix, Television Aesthetics and Style, Shane Meadows: Critical
Essays and Multiplicities: Cycles, Sequels, Remakes and Reboots in Film & Television.
Ellen Wright, Marilyn Monroe™: The problematic promotional politics of sex

aids, biopics and borrowed dresses.
This paper will examine the complex ethical politics of utilising a deceased star’s ‘brand’,
considering the specific example of the product marketing for the Womanizer Marilyn
Monroe™ clitoral stimulator.
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Monroe’s persona, with its explicit focus on feminine performativity, is a multifaceted one.
Whilst frequently discussed as a figure of female empowerment, her acute vulnerability is
also a key element within this star’s public persona, with recent reappraisals centring upon
Monroe as a victim of sexual and symbolic violence, labouring within a harmful patriarchal
industry and larger cultural context.
Furthermore, this year Monroe’s image has twice re-entered the public sphere, firstly, with
the loaning of her nude illusion gown, famously worn to sing happy birthday to John F
Kennedy, to the celebrity socialite Kim Kardashian and secondly, due to release of the
speculative and deeply controversial Netflix quasi-biopic Blonde (2022). These instances
have prompted vociferous debate around what constitutes appropriate and/or respectful
use of her image.
This paper will examine the rhetorical means through which Monroe has been strategically
deployed in the marketing of this unique product. Whilst her famously unabashed embrace
of her natural sexuality and sex appeal ("What do I wear in bed? Chanel No.5.") is clearly
being co-opted into contemporary, popular and extremely profitable understandings of
body and sex positivity, her star image has been appropriated by and attached to a vast
array of products and services over the years, so just how problematic, if at all, is this product
and its marketing?
Ellen Wright is a Senior Lecturer in Cinema and Television History at De Montfort University.
She is a multidisciplinary scholar and her research expertise is in pedagogy and the leisure
industries, consumer culture and broader social contexts surrounding Hollywood cinema in
the early and mid-twentieth century, focusing, in particular, upon representations of gender
and sexuality as found in the material culture of film. She has written on such topics as the
media reception of Betty Grable in wartime Britain, the articulation of professionalism in the
pinup self-portraiture and B movies of Bunny Yeager, fan engagement with film star gossip
in 1930s fan-made pornographic comics, and 1940s British film stardom as evidenced in
fan club publications.
Esther Wright, The uses of “History” in Digital Game Paratexts

Considering the paratextual context of historical games, and in particular areas such as
developer branding and digital promotional content, is of vital importance if we are to
contend with the uses (and abuses) of the past in the present. But this is complicated by the
fact that we lack concrete methodologies for studying video game paratexts – both past
and present practices of generating and consuming promotional discourses. Moreover, the
nature and status of many of these paratextual sources as internet-based ephemera, as thus
as born-digital, also compounds discussions around the collection and preservation digital
game paratexts (Newman and Simmons, 2018; Staiti, 2019; Kaltman 2020), while speaking
to broader concerns of digital historians about our methods and practices of engagement
with these materials in a way that is future-proof and/or sustainable. 
This paper proposes ways of thinking about what game history is, and how it is used, in such
paratextual discourses, past and present. By using recent examples of historical game
promotion, this paper not only considers the challenges of locating and studying
paratextual materials for digital games, but to continue building an argument for why we
need to think seriously about such challenges. To do so ensures that we can better
understand the various ways that “history” is used to sell video games, and sustain the future
of historical game studies as a varied and multifaceted discipline able to meaningfully shift
certain peripheral aspects of games and gaming culture to its centre.
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Esther Wright is Lecturer in Digital History at Cardiff University, where she teaches and
researches historical video games. Her work centres on understanding the role of paratexts
and branding in the construction of video game histories, and the claims of “authenticity”
that  circulate around them. Her book Rockstar Games and American HIstory: Promotional
Materials and the Construction of Authenticity, was published by De Gruyter in 2022, and
she is co-editor (with Professor John Wills) of the forthcoming volume Red Dead
Redemption: History, Myth and Violence in the Video Games West (2023).
Kiki Tianqi Yu, Cinema as the Dao: A Daoist approach to moving images as
Decolonising Knowledge Production
Like many non-Western philosophies, Daoism has been long excluded from the academic
discipline of philosophy, and side-lined to subjects that deal with ‘otherness’. Decolonising
knowledge production principally means recognising how modern knowledge is
constructed, who determines the legitimacy of knowledge and knowability, and abolishing
the prejudice that regards modern Europe as ‘the locus of serious, critical thought’ and the
golden ‘standard for explanatory significance and epistemic value’ that also shapes the
accountability of what is ethical and political. It also means positioning non-Western
epistemologies as more than ‘other’ indigenous ideas to be analysed but as analytical
frameworks in their own right. I argue that cinema as part of modern human history must be
re-evaluated with the acknowledgement of how we define human, what we call nature, and
human-nonhuman relationship are cultural constructs, and other genealogies of
knowledges enable new ways of understanding what cinema is. As a form of naturalistic
thought, Daoism is based on correlative and transformative cosmology, concerning ‘the
onto-cosmological realm of Dao qua ultimate reality’, beyond the ‘human sphere’. I argue
that since all things follow the Dao, which follows ziran (the creative process of self-
emergence), cinema itself can be associated with ‘the model of the Dao’, and a Daoist
approach posits moving images beyond a view to look at, or a brain that thinks, but a
cosmological realm wherein dwells many myriad things. Enabling comparative dialogues
with recent Euro-American posthumanist ecological reflections, a Daoist approach also
resists theoretical enfolding that simply reasserts the latter.
Kiki Tianqi Yu is a filmmaker, theorist and curator, committed to advancing dewesternised
film theories and research-led practice. She is Senior Lecturer in Film at Queen Mary
University of London, and works on cinema through Daoism, cinema and eastern
philosophies; documentary, essayistic nonfiction and artist moving images in the global
south; women’s cinema and localised feminism in East Asia. Her books include ‘My’ Self on
Camera (EUP 2019), China’s iGeneration (Bloomsbury, 2014). Kiki’s award-winning films
include Memory of Home (2009), China’s van Goghs (2016), and The Two Lives of Li Ermao
(2019). She curated ‘Polyphonic China’ (London 2009) and ‘Memory Talks” (Shanghai 2017).
Kiki Tianqi Yu, Cultivating a Sense of Oneness Through Cinema and

Sustainable Filmmaking Through Daoism
Engaging with Daoism as an analytical framework, Kiki explores two recent documentary
films, Yangtze landscape (dir. Xu Xin, 2017) and All that Breathes (dir. Shaunak Sen, 2022).
Both illustrate the interconnectedness and interdependence between the human and the
nonhuman worlds, yet do not diminish the socio-political problems of the human sphere in
their specific contexts. She will analyse how both films lend themselves to a Daoist
understanding of ‘human-nature Oneness’ through their aesthetic choices and ethical
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positionings of humans and nonhumans that are all connected by ‘qi’, vital energy. She will
then turn her attention to discussing what it means to be ethical and political in sustainable
filmmaking. Documentary has for a long time taken a humanitarian responsibility,
highlighting the politics of representations, identity crisis, and socioeconomic inequalities
in the human sphere. Recent eco-documentaries reveal ecological crisis, climate injustice
and humans’ intensive exploitation over nonhumans based on posthumanist reflections
within the European intellectual genealogy. She argues that political filmmaking for
sustainable futures carries dual duties of de-human-centrism and decolonisation, meaning
to go beyond a critical catastrophic or an educational rhetoric, but to give more agency to,
while not othering, non-western relational worldviews. A Daoist approach to sustainable
and ecological filmmaking embraces the sense of Oneness through the aesthetics, ethics
and ‘effortless’ action.
Kiki Tianqi Yu is a filmmaker, theorist and curator, committed to advancing dewesternised
film theories and research-led practice. She is Senior Lecturer in Film at Queen Mary
University of London. Kiki works on theorising cinema through Daoism; documentary,
essayistic nonfiction and artist moving images in the global south; and women’s cinema and
localised feminism in East Asia. Her books include ‘My’ Self on Camera (EUP, 2019)
and China’s iGeneration (Bloomsbury, 2014). Kiki’s award-winning films include Memory of
Home (2009), China’s van Goghs (2016), and The Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019). She curated
‘Polyphonic China’ (London 2009) and ‘Memory Talks” (Shanghai 2017). 
Misha Zakharov, Detoxifying the archive: remakes, revisions, reenactments

In the recent years, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, American critics Claire Dederer
and Emily Nussbaum have on two separate occasions asked what is essentially the same
question: What do we do with the art of monstrous men? (Dederer, 2017) and What should
we do with the art of terrible men? (Nussbaum, 2019). It is not just the filmmakers who are
being cancelled: filmmaking methods, genre tropes, and entire film genres and movements
are deemed to be problematic, toxic, or unacceptable. This fact opens up an enormously
broad set of questions and ethical dilemmas for filmmakers, programmers, archivists, and
viewers: Is deplatforming the same as gatekeeping/censorship? Should the viewers have
access to all the films, or should the works of art be put on trial and imprisoned, just as their
disgraced, de-canonised makers? What are the ethics of curating that which can be called
the toxic image? Can an archival filmmaker work with the toxic image without getting their
hands dirty, i.e. reproducing or reinforcing previous toxicity? What are the subversive (and,
indeed, decontaminating) ways of reading the toxic image? In this paper, I will turn to my
own previous encounters with the toxic image as a writer and programmer (and more
specifically to the case of Shūji Terayama’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup, 1971), as well as to
Elisabeth Subrin’s recent short film Maria Schneider, 1983 (2022), to examine the possible
avenues of dealing with the toxicity of the archive and traumatic events of the past by means
of remaking, revisioning, and reenacting.
Misha Zakharov is a Russian-Korean author, translator, film critic, and curator. Upon leaving
Russia after the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Misha has
embarked on a PhD project at the University of Warwick, as part of which he researches the
potential of film to affect social change while simultaneously working at Screening Rights,
the West Midlands social justice film festival. His work as a translator includes Maggie
Nelson’s The Argonauts (2020) and On Freedom (2021) and Sarah Schulman’s The
Gentrification of the Mind (2023). His first book, a collection of autofiction titled
Doramaroman, has been released in 2022.
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Polina Zelmanova, Mediating representations of Sex and Consent on Screen
after #MeToo
In the context of #MeToo, visual media scholars have demonstrated the importance of
thinking about film and television as socio-cultural texts which have the potential to resist
rape culture. Whilst most film and television scholarship on #MeToo addresses issues
related to the representation of sexual violence, there is an emerging interest in thinking
about resisting rape culture via alternative models of sexual intimacy. These models have a
new significance in the critical discourse of thinking about mediated intimacy within the
context of sex education (Barker et al. 2018). Within these models, the representation of
consent has become a central aspect of challenging rape culture as it allows to subvert
dominant sexual scripts, particularly related to women’s sexuality (Wilz 2020; Meek 2022).
This paper looks at a recent teen television drama, Heartbreak High (2022), reading the
show as a negotiation of the proliferation of film scholarship which celebrates positive
models of affirmative consent. Through close textual analysis of specific scenes this paper
reads the show as a site for negotiating both the importance and shortcomings of the
centrality of consent within the wider #MeToo cultural discourse on sex and pleasure. By
thinking about the negotiation in Heartbreak High, this paper raises a wider critical question
relating to the sustainability of reading film and television as a search for positive models of
sex after #MeToo. Instead, it proposes an urgent need to maintain a generous, sex critical
approach towards reading sex and intimacy, which both accounts for consent but also looks
beyond it towards more nuanced and complicated negotiations of vulnerability, ambiguity
and mutuality.
Polina Zelmanova is an AHRC Midlands4Cities funded PhD student in Film and Television
Studies at the University of Warwick. Her thesis is titled 'Sex in Contemporary Film and TV:
Power and Pleasure after #MeToo'. She is interested in the representation and politics of sex
and sexuality in popular culture, the #MeToo context, as well as broader frameworks of
queer and feminist screen studies. Outside of her research, Polina has worked in film festival
project management and as an audio-visual practitioner including for projects funded by
IATL Warwick and Coventry City of Culture.
Poppy Qian Zhai, What is a sustainable city? To brand Copenhagen as an

attractive destination in China.
Taking a China-Denmark co-produced short tourist film, Hu Ge x Copenhagen: Power of
Serenity as a case, this paper explores concepts of the sustainable city, lifestyle, and tourism
from a cross-cultural perspective. In this short documentary, the city of Copenhagen is
constructed as an attractive destination where people can find a sense of tranquillity,
allowing them to find their inner peace and then recharge their minds and bodies. So, why
is Copenhagen represented in this particular way? What has influenced the storytelling and
process of filmmaking? How are the film texts selected and organised in order to attract
more Chinese visitors to Copenhagen? This paper will answer the above questions by
analysing Denmark’s tourism policy first. The policy wants to build a sustainable tourism
industry in the city of Copenhagen by creating an emotional relationship between the
visitors and the locals, so-called “people-based growth.” It means that visitors as “temporary
locals” are invited to be part of the destination and to co-create a sustainable city with the
locals. The second part centres on the film analysis, discussing how this film combines
Denmark’s cultural values and sustainable lifestyle and Chinese aesthetics, such as the ideas
of Kongqi (air) and Vipassana, together to deliver the power of serenity that is rooted in the
Danish way of living to the Chinese audiences.
Poppy Qian Zhai is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University College London. Her
125
doctoral research project focuses on the circulation, exhibition and criticism of New Danish
Cinema in China since the 1990s, examining the South-North cross-cultural dynamics
between a small nation and a big country under globalisation. Her research interests
include transnational cinema/screen, small nation cinema, Nordic cinema, nation branding
and film production.
Shiqin Zhang, (Un)gendering the Dump: Waste, Body, and Affect in Plastic
China and When the Bough Breaks
This paper focuses on the intersection between waste and gender in two Chinese
documentary films Plastic China (dir. Wang Jiuliang, 2016) and When the Bough Breaks (dir.
Ji Dan, 2011), both of which feature people who live in the dumps on the outskirts of
megacities. It begins by examining how female bodies in the films become simultaneously
hyper-visible and invisible in the sense that they are either de-gendered or over-sexualized.
Such ambivalence, I argue, showcases the film directors' hesitancy to confront gender as a
category of political and ethical analysis in their narratives of waste and the environment.
The paper then moves on to contextualise the depictions of women in the dump in historical
narratives that for a long time treat female bodies as exploitable and disposable. While
Wang Jiuliang and Ji Dan foreground the experiences and voices of teenage girls, their
portrayals of other women as silent and passive reduce the female bodies to a deep,
ineffable fusion between thingness and subjecthood. Failing to perceive and capture the
female body in its everyday materiality, the films, like many other Chinese wasteworks, are
subsumed under the hegemonic gendered muting and eradication. Finally, drawing on the
concept of unity in Chinese philosophy and theories of affect, this paper suggests that
representations of waste in Chinese films should attend to broader experiences of
gendered oppression and subordination.
Shiqin Zhang is a PhD candidate in the School of East Asian Studies at the University of
Sheffield. Her current research project combines textual analysis and visual ethnography to
study waste, gender, and everyday memories in China.
126

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11th Annual Conference

Sustainable Futures: Ethics,

University of Lincoln, 3 – 5 April 2023

Publishers with Stands:

Monday 3 April 2023

Tuesday 4 April 2023

11:45 – 13:15 Parallel Panels: 5.1 – 5.5

13:15 – 14:15 Lunch

14:15 – 15:45 Parallel Panels: 6.1 – 6.5

16:00 – 17:30 Parallel Panels: 7.1 – 7.6

17:40 – 19:00 BAFTSS AGM, Publications and Practice Research Awards

Wednesday 5 April 2023

10:00 – 11:30 Parallel Panels 8.1 – 8.5

11:45 – 13:15 Parallel Panels 9.1 – 9.6

13:15 – 14:15 Lunch

14:15 – 15:45 Parallel Panels 10.1 – 10.5

15:45 – 16:00 Closing Remarks

Session 1 Monday 3 April 12:00 – 13:30

1.1 Special Interest Group: Adaptation

1.2 Special Interest Group: British Cinema and Television

The Ethics of True Crime Adaptation: The Staircase

Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz

The Uses of Documentary and Based-on-a-True-Story Format

CHAIR: Llewella Chapman

Carolyn Birdsall and Joanne Garde-Hansen

Colourisation, Ethics and the Archive: attending to the dead.

1.5 Film Practice Pedagogy

Rob Hardcastle and Andrew Vallance

Detoxifying the archive: remakes, revisions, reenactments

Decolonising curriculums and enabling transnational approaches across postgraduate

1.6 Practice Awards Nominees Screening 1

Session 2 Monday 3 April 14:30 – 16:00

2.1 Philosophy, Memory, Temporality

Memories of the future: Spencer (2021), history and multiple temporality

The ethics of non self being in Alexandr Askoldov’s Commissar (1967)

CHAIR: Emma Morton

“Hardship Within the Context of Joy”: Rafiki’s Queer Resistance

Mediating representations of Sex and Consent on Screen after #MeToo

2.3 Stars, Costume, Makeup

CHAIR: Llewella Chapman

2.4 Decolonising and Positionality

Researcher Positionality and the Quiet Non-Certitude of Rosine Mbakam

2.5 Fossil Aesthetics

The dam as cinematographic Atlante: hegemony, hydroelectricity and ecological sensitivity

Traces of Portuguese ecologism around the carnations

2.6 Queer Authorship

CHAIR: Billy Errington

A League of One’s Own: Abbi Jacobson the new queer pioneer

Session 3 Monday 3 April 16:15 – 17:45

3.1 Special Interest Group: Filmmaking Education

Beyond ‘Skills for a Sustainable Industry’: Socio-ecological experiments in nonfiction

Albert, Employability and the Elephant in the Room

Filmmaking for Change

Caring for the World: The Virtue of Superman

3.3 Runaway Production & Heritage

Age versus Beauty: Conservation Considerations for Filming in Heritage Properties

Margaret Tait’s Film Poems as a Model for Ecological Filmmaking Practice

Júlia Havas and Nick Jones

Dystopian Futures on Hungarian Soundstages: Technology and Support Work in Runaway

3.4 Videogames paratexts: pasts and futures

The uses of “History” in Digital Game Paratexts

The paratextual past – relating histories of game experience to game texts

Accidental archives and paratextuality

3.5 Roundtable: Ethics and Praxis – Sustainable Futures

Care, solidarity and entanglement in Khady Sylla’s Une fenêtre ouverte (2005)