[Commlist] CFP - Second Global Networking Symposium “Women’s Global Film Movements and Networks” (Feminist Film Heritage: Expanding the World’s Film Archives)

Feminist Film Heritage: Expanding the World’s Film Archives

Call for Papers: Second Global Networking Symposium

5-7 Jan 2023

THEME: “Women’s Global Film Movements and Networks”

We warmly invite proposals from international scholars and practitioners 
with a specialism in the history of global cinema, for a second 
networking event in the context of the Feminist Film Heritage project, 
funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in Scotland. With the project 
we aim to map out and rediscover the neglected cultural histories of 
women’s work in early cinema. For this second event, we wish to focus on 
the histories, infrastructures and practices of women’s networks and 
movements around the world, which supported women creatives in multiple 
ways and contributed to the visibility and sustainability of their work 
and films. We particularly want to invite those with an interest in 
transnational women’s networks and movements connected to audiovisual 
practices, such as but not limited to: suffragette movements, the 
non-aligned movement, socialist and activist networks, film clubs, 
worker’s unions, various women’s associations and organisations, and 
film festival networks, which supported women creatives in film through 
networking opportunities, mentorship, career programmes, funding, formal 
and informal film collaborations, etc.

The two-year project, Feminist Film Heritage: Expanding the World’s Film 
Archives, aims to establish an international network of scholars working 
on decentring film history, and to do so by countering feminist film 
history’s continued neglect of filmmakers from outside Europe and the 
US. Hoping to give shape to fuller configurations of the 
internationalist feminist film movement, we highlight historically 
transnational networks and reactivate past alliances. With this project 
we want to make more visible the role of women and their films in the 
global film archives, establishing a collective of feminist world cinema 
historians. Bringing together disparate efforts to safeguard individual 
corpuses of film cultures and heritage, the researchers in this network 
envisage increased collaboration across borders. Better awareness of 
presences, absences, practices and methodologies will enable new 
collaborations between partners across borders.

This initiative is rooted in a desire to consider the diverse 
methodologies of decolonizing film history in an activist feminist way. 
We critique the continued Western European dominance of funding and 
infrastructure for these efforts (including our own). We address the 
(neo-)colonial history of archives, museums and festivals; the sense of 
“service” practiced by these institutions; and the (material and 
conceptual) ownership of artefacts and restorations. This network 
emphasises the roles of women filmmakers in history; the contributions 
of feminist scholars to film historiography; and the women workers 
shaping the structures on which the archival and preservation 
institutions are built.

The first event, which took place between 10 and 14 January 2022, 
organised by QMU in Edinburgh and funded by the Royal Society of 
Edinburgh, gathered over a hundred film practitioners, film historians, 
and archivists from around the world in an effort to map out existing 
work and seek out productive pathways towards collaboration. During the 
five-day global networking event, we were able to learn about national, 
family and personal archives and initiatives, and preservation 
facilities and professionals (such as the Pan-African Film Archive, the 
Albanian Film Archive, and family archives of black Latin American 
women’s films), and neglected films and filmmaker collectives from 
around the world (such as women’s third world cinema movement, and 
women’s networks and work within film clubs), and we were able to 
establish the grounds for collaborative networks with one another for 
further research.

This second collaborative networking event, organised by the Janovics 
Centre for Screen and Performing Arts Studies at the Faculty of Theatre 
and Film at Babeș-Bolyai University and funded by the Royal Society of 
Edinburgh, will take place 5-7 January 2023 in an online format to allow 
participation from scholars and practitioners around the world. Its 
principal aim is to continue and deepen discussions initiated at the 
first event, to welcome new research and forge connections among 
participants as well as to continue ongoing collaborations, in an effort 
to safeguard global women’s film heritage and make visible different 
cultural histories of women’s participation in cinema.

Please email the organiser, Dr Ana Grgic, on (ana.grgic /at/ ubbcluj.ro), with 
your proposal for a short, 10-minute presentation, indicating your 
interest and specialism and a short bio. Please send a 200-word summary 
of your research interests and 100-word bio, in order that we may 
organise presentations, focus groups, and networking sessions. Deadline: 
Monday 31 October 6pm GMT.


The FFH Team: Dr Lizelle Bisschoff, Dr Ana Grgic and Dr Stefanie Van de Peer

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