Crossings: Stories of Migration (June-September 2017) is an ICA-led UK-wide film and events programme supported by the BFI using National Lottery funding, in partnership with the Goethe-Institut and the School of Film & Television, Falmouth University.
We live in an age of migration. Driven by political and military conflicts, the pressures and possibilities of increasingly globalised economies, climate change and the desire for a better life, more people than ever move and live across borders. These are diverse trajectories; each journey has its own story and each story its own journey, traversing different landscapes and carrying with it its own past.
Through a programme of screenings and events, Crossings explores the stories of modern-day migration and reflects on cinema’s potential to interrogate the damaging ways in which migration is often framed. Including a variety of documentary and fiction features, the programme engages with transnational crossings from the last five decades through different forms of aesthetically innovative storytelling.
As part of the Crossings project, the ICA intends to curate scholarly and creative responses to the issues raised by the season, which will be hosted on their dedicated website https://www.crossings2017.co.uk/
The website is intended to function as an ongoing repository for a range of essays, short films, film essays, reviews, and scholarly endeavour which will live on past the screening season itself.
Please note: Crossings will run throughout the summer, and as such, we are as interested in responses to the screenings as we are in pre-existing or ‘anticipatory’ work; therefore, a further call for submissions will be made in early Autumn.
We welcome any proposals, and wish to take a flexible and imaginative approach to format and length, but academic and creative work from undergraduate and postgraduate students and ECRs are particularly welcome.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Transnational communication
- Migration and diasporic community
- Borders and transgressions
- The physical and metaphorical journey of migration
- Migration, power and agency
- The political contexts of migration
- Repression and ‘Othering’
- The reproduction or breaching of stereotypes around migration
Please send a brief (500-1000 word) abstract with short bio to laura.canning@falmouth.ac.uk including the term “Crossings” in your subject heading. Deadline for initial submissions: Friday August 4th 2017.
Crossings brings together leading commentators, critics and contributors from across various cultural and political contexts to create a rigorous yet diverse platform for discussion to explore migration from both global and local perspectives. Engaging with ethical and political questions raised by representing these narratives on screen, the season aims to open space for dialogue at a time when this is more urgent than ever. For further details on the schedule of films and venues, please see https://www.crossings2017.co.uk/
