The present research posits the significant role that arts and cultural festivals play in contributing to placemaking and generating well-being within communities. Placemaking is recognized to be important when considering how to improve population health and wellbeing, and festivals can be seen to amplify those benefits. Drawing on qualitative data gathered from interviews with festival organizers in SouthEast England and deploying theories of space from Foucault and Massey, the present article argues that community arts and cultural festivals support the positive creation or transformation of pro-social spaces that could support community acceptance and well-being, the ability to live together and cohesively and accepting difference.
Highlights• The study identified four key themes demonstrating that through their use of space, arts and cultural festivals contribute to community sense of well-being and place.• Festivals can imbue connection to and sense of belonging to place for local communities through history, heritage and the traditions presented.• The study suggests access to and participation in the arts is enhanced by using everyday and familiar places.• How festivals reimagine and use space is important to community development and potentially to a placemaking agenda for enhancing public health.• This paper conceptualizes the complex interrelationships of spatial theories specifically applied to arts and culture festivals for placemaking.
The Lives of Others (2006) has been a phenomenally successful film, winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Feature in 2007. Yet despite the critical acclaim it has received abroad, in Germany reactions have been more mixed. Many commentators, especially historians, have been at pains to point out that the transformation of the Stasi officer into the guardian angel of his target is wholly unrealistic in the context of the GDR. However, many of the same critics also concede that the film is very effective. It is this paradox that the present article will examine. Hitherto, very few, if any, examinations of the film have ever looked at its construction and impact as film. We will explore the way that the generic conventions of melodrama have been adapted to create what we might call an authenticity of affect, which actually enhances the film's treatment of injustice and redemption.
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