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

Jamie Chambers,Will Higbee

doi:10.16995/os.8009

Abstract

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

Highlights

Nadir Bouhmouch’s documentary Amussu (2020) features a sequence depicting the Imider Film Festival for Environmental Justice, a small village film festival at which films are projected outside at night, under the stars
As with other films falling within the frame of a folk cinema, Amussu has a strong sense of a primary (Chambers, in press: 402) or authenticating audience (Cade Bambara, 1993), to whom it speaks first and foremost, whilst simultaneously being consciously shaped to address global cosmopolitan audiences on the festival circuit
Curated by one of the authors of this essay, the Folk Film Gathering serves as a form of embodied research through which to explore the ongoing questions of a folk cinema in a ‘peopled’ setting, with diverse audiences

Summary

Introduction

Nadir Bouhmouch’s documentary Amussu (2020) features a sequence depicting the Imider Film Festival for Environmental Justice, a small village film festival at which films are projected outside at night, under the stars. Firstly situating the screening practices of the Folk Film Gathering within a consideration of the ways in which film festival exhibition can serve as embodied research (before placing our subsequent case studies within this context), this essay reflects upon some of the novel forms of solidarity cinema has been able to foster during the pandemic as well as its limitations.

Results

Conclusion