This chapter is in part a manifesto and in part an engagement with the thinking and practice already re-shaping film festivals in this era of decolonization and Covid-19. We take as a starting point and analyze the provocative docu-fiction film titled Film Festival Film (dir. Perivi Katjavivi and Mpumelelo Mcata, 2019, South Africa) which raises myriad, difficult, and enduring questions about film festivals and contemporary film culture. Reading the provocations of this film alongside our own respective research into and work with film festivals and film curation (mostly in relation to African filmmaking), we then put ourselves into conversation with 22 film festival curators and filmmakers around the world who have shared their experiences with us, as well as with recent decolonial theorizing (by, e.g., Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Mignolo and Walsh). The chapter grapples with questions such as what does decolonization mean in relation to contemporary film culture? What would decolonized film festival worlds look like? And what have film practitioners learned from their work during the Covid-19 pandemic that might help us to collectively realize those worlds? In this way, we try to chart the significant work being done by many people to build more inclusive, sustainable, decolonized film cultures.
Teaching film often involves un-learning previously taught histories of cinema to find instead ‘herstories’ (Dovey, 2018) and theirstories of cinema. This video essay constitutes an illustrative example of this practice, showing how Lebanese woman-led film Caramel (2007) is taught at SOAS, University of London to emphasise the crucial role of sound in narrative while rethinking the film canon and encouraging critical reflection on the gaze. By creatively compiling encounters between two characters in the film, the video essay shows two women gazing at each other in ways that evoke a romantic relationship, even if their contact stays in the hair salon. While there is barely any dialogue, the extra-diegetic music forges an intimate atmosphere. The decoding of these moments is shaped by the context of censorship in Lebanon, where explicit representations of same-sex relationships could be punished by law. In this video essay, I suggest that sound helps represent a queer gaze between the two characters, subverting both heteronormativity and patriarchal society, and in so doing, it also queers the audience’s gaze. Caramel thus serves as an excellent case study of the possibilities of sound in film, and of film as sound art.
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