Imagine a film festival not only as an event, but as a site of production, research and learning. A festival, dedicated to address the various challenges of rural areas within their respective historical backgrounds through the collective and inviting methodologies of filmmaking and film viewing. To spark innovative ideas in exchange with other peripheral, rural places.
A carefully curated selection of films across genres opens up global perspectives on rural issues, including questions of time, material and heritage, artistic and collective entrepreneurship, care, agriculture and food production, and ways to foster circular economies.
With an approach to cinema as night-school, the festival will offer a framework for conversations and reflection, learning to see and to create relations between film narratives and the corresponding environment of the local areas. As part of the learning process, visiting students, filmmakers, artists will actively engage with the place and work with the people through the making of new audio-visual material during and after the period of the festival. Developing questions, insights, skills, potential solutions — a way to understand the value of on-site production and to propel and change perspectives with an audience as makers.
Involvement of the local youth in various capacities — as translators and co-ordinators, as co-creators and co-producers of the audio-visual material — will be encouraged. The festival will create opportunities to participate in innovative, open and care-centric ways of cultural production and to get hands-on experience with video production, design and publishing not only as skills but as methodologies for research. Involvement of women as interlocutors and co-creators will be crucial as their perspective on labour and value is essential to the re-framing of concerns around circular economies.
The structure and dynamic of the festival itself will change accordingly. The festival-time is not seen as a representative endpoint of an exclusive preparation process, but as period of intensification as part of a pre- and postproduction, and as a new starting point. The subsequent process of editing and re-viewing will allow for a time of reflection and preparation for the next festival, not through the pressing logic to increase and surpass, but as a continuation according to the needs, questions and experiences raised through the previous one.