Paperworks & Participants

Speaker: Dorota Ostrowska

The festive chronotope emerges at the intersection of space, programming and curating practice, and audience, and shapes the character and cultural politics of film festival event. Rooted in Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of the chronotope and the carnivalesque, originally developed in relation to literature, the framework is here adapted and extended to the specific conditions of the film festival seen as a spatio-temporal cultural form, and proposes film festivals not just as events but as experiences. 
As a modern-day carnival, a film festival is shaped by the centripetal forces (hierarchical, state-run, ideological, homogenising) and centrifugal forces (disruptive, critical, countercultural), constituting the carnivalesque dynamic that renders most festivals potentially transgressive social and political rituals, with varying degrees of intensity and public impact. Festive chronotopes capture these dynamics as distinct spatio-temporal modes of contemporary festival culture, connecting the symbolic value of the festival space with the symbolic value of its programmed films and their reception — first by programmers, then by critics, and ultimately by audiences.
This talk applies the festive chronotope framework to short, experimental, and arts film festivals and short film sidebars for the first time. Drawing on a typology that includes migrant, crisis, and indigenous festive chronotopes, it asks: can short film festivals be mapped onto an existing chronotopic category? Do they embody a hybrid mode drawing on several chronotopes simultaneously? Or do they constitute an entirely new chronotopic form within the broader ecology of contemporary festive culture? The implications for how we understand the cultural, political, and civic function of short film festivals — and this festival — are considerable within the festive chronotopic framework.

Biography: Dorota Ostrowska is Senior Lecturer in Film and Modern Media at Birkbeck, University of London, where she directs the MA Film and Screen Media at the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication. She is the author of The European Film Festival: Carnival, Audiences and Spaces (Bloomsbury, 2026) and Reading the French New Wave: Critics, Writers and Art Cinema in France (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2008), and co-editor of Shaping Film Festivals in a Changing World: Practice and Methods (AUP, 2025, open access), Popular Cinemas in Central and Eastern Europe: Film Cultures and Histories (Bloomsbury/I.B. Tauris, 2017), and European Cinemas in the Television Age (EUP, 2007). Her research examines the cultures, spaces and practices that shape our experience of cinema across different exhibition contexts and historical periods. Alongside this, she champions writing-rich pedagogical practice and explores the critical and ethical dimensions of AI in education. Dorota was a CLASP Fellow at the Institute for Writing and Thinking, Bard College, OSUN (2023–2025) and is Senior Fellow Advance HE (SFHEA) (2023). 
 

Author: Franciszek Drąg
Institution: Adam Mickiewicz University / IYAFF Ale Kino!
 

Short film programming for young audiences is often treated as a technical or educational task: selecting “appropriate” content for a given age group. Yet what counts as appropriate exposes a field of constant negotiation. Drawing on my curatorial practice at Ale Kino! International Young Audience Film Festival and my work in cultural studies, this paper argues that programming for children and young people is never neutral. It is a site where competing values, institutional expectations, and assumptions about childhood are tested, affirmed, and/or challenged.
 
The paper traces decision-making behind short film selection in three areas: (1) criteria used to balance artistic risk with age-specific sensitivity; (2) the moving boundary of “appropriateness” and who decides about it; and (3) the role of the curator as a mediator between filmmakers, institutions, educators, parents, and young viewers. Rather than approaching children as passive recipients requiring protection, I propose understanding youth programming as a practice of care that acknowledges young audiences as capable cultural participants.
 
By reflecting on specific programming dilemmas and festival contexts, the paper demonstrates how short film festivals become spaces where broader social debates about representation, responsibility, and agency are negotiated. In doing so, it contributes to discussions on public engagement by positioning youth-focused curation as a form of cultural and ethical practice.
 
Keywords: young audience, censorship, curation, audience mediation

Biography: Franciszek Drąg is a cultural and film studies scholar, doctoral student at the Doctoral School of Humanities at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, and a member of the Memory Studies Association. His academic research focuses on the cultural memory of epidemic crises in visual culture. He is a short film curator, a long-term collaborator of the Ale Kino! International Young Audience Film Festival, and an occasional film critic.

Author: Meral Özçınar
Institution: Manisa Celal Bayar University
 
This paper examines short film festivals not merely as exhibition platforms, but as cultural and institutional spaces that actively shape public discourse through curatorial practices. Focusing on the Izmir International Short Film Festival as a case study, the research explores how programming decisions, thematic selections, and evaluation processes contribute to the circulation and legitimisation of socially engaged narratives within contemporary short cinema.
 
Drawing on festival studies and cultural mediation approaches, the paper argues that short film festivals function as sites where aesthetic value, political sensitivity, and public engagement intersect. In this context, festivals do not simply present films to audiences; they actively construct frameworks through which issues such as vulnerability, social exclusion, and cultural diversity become visible and discussable.
 
The study highlights the role of curators as mediators who negotiate between filmmakers, institutions, audiences, and broader social concerns. By examining the relationship between curation and public discourse, the paper contributes to ongoing debates about the social and cultural responsibilities of film festivals within contemporary media ecologies.
 
Keywords: short film festivals, cultural mediation, public engagement, curatorial practices, festival studies

Biography: Prof. Dr. Meral Özçınar is a media and cinema researcher whose work focuses on storytelling, soundscape narration, and participatory media practices. She has extensive experience in EU-funded projects dedicated to cultural participation and vulnerable groups. Her work includes soundwalk-based practices in Ferrara and interdisciplinary storytelling workshops that explore listening, space, and narrative as tools for social and cultural engagement.
 

Author: Xinyu Yu
Institution: University College London (UCL), United Kingdom
 
Short film festivals are often regarded as entry points through which small cities enter public cultural discussion. Yet in cities with underdeveloped film industries, they may function less as neutral platforms for local expression than as mechanisms that organise visibility. Taking the Macao International Film Festival and the Galaxy Entertainment Group Macao International Short Film Festival as case studies, and drawing on participants’ perspectives, this essay examines how Macao produces cultural visibility and public engagement.
 
Macao has long occupied a tense position between “screen presence” and “narrative absence” in regional cinema. Its casino spaces, colonial architecture, and cross-cultural textures frequently appear on screen, but often as substitutes for other cities. Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 (2004), for example, uses Macao’s old buildings and dim interiors to reconstruct a nostalgic image of old Hong Kong, while Macao’s histories and narrative agency remain marginal.
 
Drawing on Chris Berry and Luke Robinson’s concept of Chinese film festivals as “sites of translation”, this essay understands Macao’s festivals as spaces of cultural translation and institutional negotiation. It argues that local visibility does not necessarily signal the growth of a local film ecology, but is shaped by casino capital, government cultural policy, university-based cultural labour, and Mainland Chinese media networks.
 
The Macao International Film Festival constructs an international cinematic image through awards, red carpets, and celebrity attendance, yet largely depends on Mainland Chinese and overseas film networks. The Galaxy short film festival includes local sections such as “Macao Shorts”, but its connection to casino capital, integrated resort spaces, and tourism consumption limits local shorts’ circulation beyond festival circles.
 
Together, these cases reveal a paradox faced by regions with weak film industries: festivals can create cultural prosperity while transforming industrial absence into festival performance and reabsorbing local culture into urban branding, capital legitimacy, and policy display.
 
Keywords: Macao short film festivals, public engagement, managed visibility

Biography: Xinyu Yu is an MA Film Studies student at University College London and holds a BA in Film and Television Production from Macau University of Science and Technology. Her research focuses on regional film cultures, short film festivals, and urban screen representation. Her practical experience with the Macao International Film Festival and Macao International Short Film Festival informs her interest in local visibility and public engagement.
 

Author: Federica Carbone
Institution: Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, Italy

  
In the contemporary audiovisual industry, the short film emerges as a production form that is difficult to reconcile with traditional economic logics based on commercial distribution and direct financial return. Yet its persistent vitality points to the existence of alternative models of sustainability, grounded in hybrid funding networks, festival circuits, and forms of symbolic capital.
 
This paper examines the Torino Short Film Market, a project by Centro Nazionale del Cortometraggio, Torino Film Industry and Torino Film Festival, as an emblematic case study of an ecosystem that supports the production and circulation of short films beyond market logic.
 
Rather than functioning simply as a showcase event for films, the festival is interpreted as a platform of cultural and economic intermediation, capable of connecting emerging filmmakers, public institutions, distributors, industry professionals and audiences.
 
Through a mixed approach combining literature review and social listening analysis using data from the Blogmeter research institute, the paper addresses the following question: how can the sustainability of short film production rely on a plurality of resources, such as European and Italian public funding, networking practices, industry programmes, and mechanisms of symbolic legitimation?
 
In this context, can the value of short films be understood not only through their capacity to generate profit, but also through their role as relational and formative devices within the audiovisual field?
 
The analysis contributes to current debates on cultural economies by proposing a broader understanding of sustainability that includes economic, social, institutional and symbolic dimensions.
 
Keywords: short film, Turin festival, sustainability

Biography: Federica Carbone is a PhD candidate at the School of Media and Communication at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. Her research focuses on the relationship between sustainability communication and film festivals. She holds a bachelor's degree in Communication and Marketing and a master's degree in Digital Marketing. She previously worked for Blogmeter, an Italian research institute, and has been a Visiting Researcher at Utrecht University.
 

Author: Ezra Winton
Institution: American University in Bulgaria
 
Film festivals are dynamic sites where culture, politics, discourse and values intersect among a diverse range of stakeholders. In my recently completed monograph on the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto, I interrogate the commercialization of documentary through a neoliberal framework and explore how film festivals are uniquely positioned to resist dominant sociopolitical and economic forces while simultaneously being shaped by them.
 
This presentation shares findings from a curatorial analysis of thirty years of programming at one of the world’s largest documentary film festivals, encompassing 4,753 films. The research includes a close examination of content, form, filmmakers and institutional contexts. Although the project does not focus specifically on short films, it reflects on the ways in which short documentaries often sit uneasily within commercially driven festival models.
 
The analysis approaches neoliberalism as a conceptual apparatus that shapes both the institution of the film festival and the films themselves. It explores expectations surrounding documentary cinema, particularly its long-standing associations with social justice, community engagement and solidarity. The research argues that these values have gradually weakened at Hot Docs, where public interest and activism have increasingly been displaced by entertainment-oriented and commodified approaches.
 
As solidarity offers an antidote to neoliberalism, the paper argues for a shift in cultural politics at Hot Docs and other documentary festivals influenced by similar pressures. It advocates for a renewed commitment to documentary’s capacity to convene political communities and create spaces for transformative social engagement.
 
Keywords: neoliberalism, cultural politics, documentary, solidarity

Biography: Ezra Winton is a cultural scholar, film critic and curator whose research examines documentary film, film festivals, identity and ecology, particularly the intersections of representation, neoliberalism and cultural politics. His work combines close film analysis with institutional and media studies approaches. He is Assistant Professor at the American University in Bulgaria and co-founder of Cinema Politica.

Author: Junhan (Julian) Wang
Institution: Temple University, United States
 
This paper examines the political economy of cultural production through an ethnographic case study of the VITA SHORTS Film Festival, an independent short film festival operating within the complex media landscape of contemporary China. Drawing on fieldwork, participant observation, interviews, and visual ethnographic methods, the study explores how cultural producers negotiate institutional constraints, censorship mechanisms, market pressures, and artistic aspirations.
 
The paper investigates the festival as a site where cultural, economic, and political forces intersect. It analyses how organisers, filmmakers, and audiences participate in processes of cultural production and circulation while navigating state regulation and limited opportunities for independent exhibition. Particular attention is given to the tensions between creative autonomy and institutional dependency, as well as the strategies employed by cultural actors to sustain alternative spaces for film culture.
 
The presentation combines academic analysis with visual ethnographic material and includes excerpts from a documentary produced as part of the research. Through this approach, the paper highlights how short film festivals function not only as exhibition platforms but also as spaces of negotiation, resistance, and community building within constrained cultural environments.
 
By focusing on the everyday practices of festival organisation and participation, the study contributes to broader debates on political economy, independent cinema, cultural labour, and the role of film festivals in shaping public engagement.
 
Keywords: independent film festival, cultural production, visual ethnography, political economy of media, censorship

Biography: Junhan (Julian) Wang is a PhD candidate at Temple University whose research focuses on media industries, cultural production, visual ethnography, and independent film cultures. His work explores the relationship between media institutions, state regulation, and creative practices, particularly within contemporary Chinese audiovisual culture. Combining ethnographic and audiovisual research methods, he examines how filmmakers, festival organisers, and cultural workers negotiate political and economic constraints while creating spaces for alternative forms of cultural expression.

Author: Carlos Navarro González
Institution: Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale, France
 
Short film festivals routinely claim to do what dominant distribution cannot: to make visible what the market obscures, to programme what algorithms do not promote. This paper questions that claim by examining a structural contradiction that the festival field has largely declined to name. These are not marginal works circulating outside institutional recognition: the short films of Shayma' Awawdeh, Nisreen Yaseen, and Rehab Nazzal have circulated through the circuits that define short film legitimacy — IDFA, BFI London, Clermont-Ferrand, Boston Palestine Film Festival, among others — while remaining subject to systematic suppression on the platforms that programmers, curators, and audiences now use as primary research infrastructure.
 
Drawing on digital rights documentation from 7amleh, Access Now, and Amnesty International (2021–2024), the paper maps the mechanisms through which this suppression operates: content moderation policies that disproportionately flag Arabic-language material, shadowbanning of Palestinian visual testimony, and the removal of accounts belonging to filmmakers whose work depicts everyday life under occupation. It then traces the epistemic consequences for festival programming: when the discovery process is mediated by platforms that have already filtered out Palestinian visual culture, the diversity commitments of even the most politically conscious festival remain structurally dependent on a colonial archive.
 
The paper argues that this is not a problem of curatorial intention but of curatorial method — and that decolonising festival programming requires, as a first step, naming the infrastructure through which knowledge about films is produced and what that infrastructure systematically cannot find. It concludes with concrete proposals for counter-archival discovery practices grounded in Palestinian-led distribution networks and digital rights literacy.
 
Keywords: algorithmic suppression, colonial archive, Palestinian short cinema

Biography: Carlos Navarro González is a researcher and lecturer at the Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale (France), specialising in decolonial visual studies, Palestinian women's cinema, and digital coloniality. He is the author of Disputing the Archive: Palestinian Women Filmmakers, AI, and the Battle over Representation (Wiley-Blackwell, 2026) and has presented at ICA, NECS, and AE-IC conferences. His work combines film analysis, practitioner interviews, and digital methods research.

Author: Mara M. Marxsen
Institution: Kurzfilm Agentur Hamburg e.V., Germany

Drawing on Laura U. Marks' concept of the "ethical presenter," this paper proposes a critical inquiry into the selection processes and representational responsibilities of short film distributors. While curators and programmers have received growing scholarly attention as cultural gatekeepers, distributors remain a largely overlooked intermediary — despite the fact that their decisions fundamentally shape which short films get seen, by whom, and for how long, well beyond the festival circuit.
 
This proposal asks: What ethical frameworks, whether implicit or explicit, govern short film distribution, and how do these shape whose work gets circulated, to whom, and under what conditions?
 
The paper is grounded in professional practice and in a roundtable initiated specifically to address these questions from within the field. Bringing together peers from across the short film distribution sector, the roundtable proceeds from the conviction that ethical frameworks are best developed collectively, through open reflection on the criteria, assumptions, and responsibilities that shape distribution decisions in practice. Taking place shortly before the conference, it serves as a first step in an ongoing process of critical reflection.
 
Anticipated findings suggest that selection criteria in distribution remain largely tacit and unarticulated — with significant consequences for the diversity of short films entering long-term circulation. The research aims to develop a framework for ethical distribution: one that foregrounds responsibilities towards filmmakers, audiences, exhibition contexts, and the broader cultural image of short film as an art form.
 
By bringing professional practice and critical reflection into dialogue, this inquiry opens space for a field-wide conversation on accountability and representation in short film distribution.
 
Keywords: visibility, distribution, ethics, circulation, gatekeeping, responsibility, public engagement, representation 

Biography: Mara M. Marxsen is part of the distribution team at Kurzfilm Agentur Hamburg. She holds an MA in Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image, has worked as a research associate at the University of Hamburg, and co-authored The Literariness of Media Art (Routledge, 2019). As a short film curator, Mara brings a queer-feminist perspective to her programmes, foregrounding work that entertains and challenges audiences in equal measure. In 2024, she defended her doctoral thesis on the willful poetics of Sadie Benning, Sarah Jacobson, and Jennifer Reeder.

Author: Claudy Op den Kamp
Institution: Bournemouth University, United Kingdom

This paper presents FIRST: Archival Encounters That Set History in Motion, an academic videographic monograph comprising 24 written essays and accompanying short-form audiovisual works. The project centres on “first-ness” as an archival and legal construct, addressing the identification of the first motion picture registered for US copyright. By reconstructing the 130-year archival trajectory of Edison Kinetoscopic Records (1893), it corrects the long-standing misidentification of Fred Ott’s Sneeze and examines how such errors circulate across scholarship, exhibition, and public discourse.
 
Each chapter takes the form of a letter to Ainsworth Rand Spofford, the sixth Librarian of Congress, combining historiographic inquiry with an autoethnographic and practice-based approach. The project’s twenty-four short video essays are embedded in the printed book through QR codes, creating a hybrid and distributed scholarly form.
 
The paper asks what happens to short-form films when they are removed from festival circuits and re-situated within a scholarly monograph. How does this shift reconfigure their role as public-facing works, their relationship to institutional frameworks, and their capacity for policy engagement? The paper argues that the videographic monograph functions as a complementary infrastructure to festivals rather than a replacement for them, extending the temporal life, accessibility, and interpretive framing of short-form audiovisual works.
 
Keywords: videographic criticism, short films, film festivals, archives, circulation

Biography: Claudy Op den Kamp is Principal Academic in Film and Deputy Director of the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management (CIPPM) at Bournemouth University. A former Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, she is the author of The Greatest Films Never Seen (2018). Her work focuses on copyright, archives, and the circulation of moving images. She is also a video essayist whose recent works include The Shadow Line (2022) and Dear Anne (2026).

Author: Antonio Peláez-Barceló
Institution: Independent Researcher, Spain
 
Founded at the end of the 1980s, Plataforma de Nuevos Realizadores – PNR (New Filmmakers Platform) was created to support, promote and exhibit the work of emerging Spanish filmmakers, with short cinema occupying a central place in its cultural mission. This paper examines the Festival de Cine de Madrid–PNR (FCM-PNR), launched in 1991, as a case study to understand how short film festivals can foster artistic autonomy, professional access, and socio-political discourse.
The research asks how the festival has articulated the relationship between short cinema, public engagement and political change in Spain from the 1990s to the present. It also asks how broader social, political and institutional transformations have reshaped the festival itself, while PNR’s discourse has continued to defend short films as autonomous cultural forms rather than merely as stepping stones towards feature filmmaking.
Methodologically, the project combines archival research into internal PNR sources, analysis of publicly available festival programs and PNR materials, the researcher’s positionality as a former PNR member, and semi-structured interviews with programmers, PNR representatives and filmmakers selected by the festival. The analysis is organized chronologically, comparing changes in festival structure and programming with key moments in recent Spanish socio-political history, including the cultural visibility of 1992, alternating socialist and conservative governments, the 2008 financial crisis, feminist and memory politics, the pandemic and the current crisis of visibility in audiovisual culture.
By comparing programming patterns, curatorial discourse and filmmakers’ testimonies, the paper argues that FCM-PNR has not only functioned as an industry platform for new talent but also as a cultural mediator that has helped shape the public value of short cinema in Spain. Its evolving sections and institutional priorities reveal how a short film festival can negotiate between artistic independence, professional development and public engagement.
 
Keywords: short film festivals, Spanish cinema, programming, public engagement, Plataforma Nuevos Realizadores

Biography: Antonio Peláez-Barceló is a researcher, programmer, and cultural worker specialising in Spanish cinema and film festivals. His work focuses on the history of short film culture, exhibition practices, and the role of festivals in supporting emerging filmmakers. He has collaborated with several cultural organisations and audiovisual initiatives dedicated to the promotion of Spanish short cinema.
 

Stefan Prohorov is a cultural manager and film professional with extensive experience in international film cooperation, festival programming, and cultural policy. He serves as Expert for International Relations at the Bulgarian National Film Centre, where he represents Bulgaria within Eurimages. His professional background includes work in film exhibition, festival management, and audience development, with a particular focus on European cinema and international co-production. Prohorov has collaborated with leading cultural institutions and film festivals in Bulgaria and abroad, contributing to initiatives that support emerging filmmakers and strengthen cross-border cooperation. He is actively involved in industry events, jury work, and professional training programs across Europe. His work is dedicated to promoting cultural exchange, innovation, and sustainable development within the audiovisual sector.