Impressions from the Conference Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe

The first in a series of conferences and workshops organised by the AHRC Research Network, the Migrant Cinema Conference in Oxford (6 - 8 July 2006) attracted some seventy delegates from eighteen different countries.

Please visit the photo gallery which captures the wonderful atmosphere of this conference

But not only in that sense was it a truly international event. The Panels aimed to transgress the confines of national cinema by exploring issues of cultural hybridity, the artistic trajectories of migrant filmmakers and the mainstreaming of migrant and diasporic filmmaking in comparative, transnational contexts.

Amongst the many highlights of the conference were the screenings of Ayse Polat's En Garde and Pawel Pawlikowski's Last Resort in the Phoenix Picture House. In the Q & A sessions which followed the screenings conference delegates and the wider public had the opportunity to discuss with the filmmakers how they perceived their position in the national film cultures in which they operate and how they respond to being labeled as 'diasporic' or 'migrant' filmmakers.

Other focal points of the conference were the plenary papers given by Professor Hamid Naficy ('Accented Cinema and its Multiple Languages'), Professor Deniz Göktürk  ('Sound Bridges: Transnational Mobility as Ironic Melodrama'), Professor Rob Burns ('Turkish-German Cinema: From Cultural Resistance to Transnational Cinema?') and Professor Dina Iordanova ('Migration and Creative Convenience: Pragmatics of Belonging and Domicile'). Professor Kim Knott, who is Director of the AHRC Programme Diasporas, Migration and Identities, provided an overview of the Programme and insight into the numerous other fascinating projects which received funding.

Themes which emerged most prominently at the conference were gendering and queering the diaspora, the position of Turkey in Europe, the evolution of beur cinema in Fance, developments in Black and Asian-British cinema over the past twenty-five years, the representation of migration and remigration on screen and the significant changes that have affected East European and Balkan cinema since the collapse of communism. A special panel was devoted to the oeuvre of Pawel Pawlikowski which traced the theme of journeys of desire in his documentaries and feature films. 

Posted by Daniela Berghahn on 11 Jul 2006 •