Pas encore de mots-clés.
In 2020, of one my goals was to start adding conferences, papers and publications to my academic portfolio. However, as lockdown measures have been put in place in most of Europe, many academic conferences had to be cancelled or postponed, including the ones where I was confirmed speaker. But nothing is lost, it only gets transformed, and instead of presenting my findings in these conferences, I will be sharing with you here how I went about finding the topics that I wanted to present and why I wanted to present them.
A conference which I was very much looking forward to in May was the 5th Transatlantic Dialogue, organised by the University of Luxembourg. I was a confirmed speaker and my topic was based on my volunteering experience to film festivals in Edinburgh. I was supposed to present my findings in a roundtable discussion, which I was very happy about, because as a student journalist during the 4th Transatlantic Dialogue in 2017, these roundtable discussions were especially interactive and engaging and created some interesting exchanges.
The title of my presentation is/was/will be "Film festivals as the home away from home: The case study of Spanish film festivals in Edinburgh." The background to why I chose to focus on Edinburgh-based film festivals on Spain was my personal experience and connection to the Spanish community in Edinburgh through Spanish friends and the university. I volunteered for the Edinburgh Spanish Film Festival and the Edinburgh International Film Festival while doing my Master's degree in the University of Edinburgh in 2019, and this experience opened my eyes to how film festivals can be used to create connections between immigrant and host communities and how they can become driving forces in cultural exchange.
Through my experience with film festivals in Edinburgh, I realised that, especially in 2019, there was a real abundance of film festivals based in Edinburgh that focused on Spain, Spanish-speaking culture and on Spanish cinema. Alongside the Edinburgh Spanish Film Festival which focuses on cinema from the Spanish-speaking world, the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2019 focused on films from Spain with their special selection for the "Once Upon a Time in Spain" programme. Cinemaattic and the Edinburgh College of Art also organised events in 2019 where film and documentary film makers from Spain could present their work to the Scottish audience.
In the case of Edinburgh, there is a big Spanish community due to the high number of Spanish students and young people who see Edinburgh as an attractive city to live and work compared to their outlook in Spain. However, these young migrants often face challenges when it comes to their integrating into the Scottish job market and often work below their education levels in precarious positions, while the language barrier also adds to their vulnerable situation. Therefore, there are also challenges to societal integration as there is a lack of safe space where Spanish immigrants and the Scottish host community can connect, communicate and learn from each other.
This is where film festivals, in my experience, achieved to create a safe space for communication: it allows Spanish immigrants to gain more visibility in society, to present their culture and language to the Scottish, who, as a result, become interested in learning more about Spain and Spanish-speaking cultures, which then results in mutual exchanges, collaborative projects and a better understanding of each other. Thus, film festivals are also a perfect opportunity to invite artists and film makers as this creates a platform for mutual artistic and cultural exchange.
In my presentation, I wanted to highlight the benefits of such exchanges on both sides, that is, for both the Spanish immigrants and the Scottish host society. The choice of films and the programming of the film festivals is key in this endevour. As the aforementioned film festivals presented what we could call "modern classics" in their programme and films that cinephile Spanish have most probably seen (and most probably while they were still based in Spain), I would argue that for the Spanish people who attend these film festivals while living in Edinburgh, seeing these films outside of their national context, in their new "host" context, recreates a feeling of home. Similarly to how Spanish immigrants perceive themselves - outside of their national context, in a different city - seeing cult Spanish films creates a link between their past and present, the "here" and "there". It relativises what is "home" and what is "away", because if one can see and encounter on a regular basis products of their own national context, it erases the feeling of being forcibly taken from their roots and allows the root culture to flourish even outside its national and original geographical context. This is also why you will find many "foreign" or "exotic" restaurants or food shops in certain parts of Edinburgh which are clusters for immigrant communities.
Film festivals are cultural diplomacy at its best, because they allow the viewer to learn about a country or a language through presenting its cultural products in an engaging and entertaining way, without a sense of forced didactism. In the case of Spanish film festivals based in a Scottish context, I argue that the mutual admiration of these two cultures towards each other is a driving force towards continuing to engage with each other on a cultural ground. For the Spanish, Scotland is an exotic and mysterious place with a very different climate and language. For the Scottish, Spain is an exotic and mysterious place with a very different climate and language. They both admire each other for their differences and this allows them to communicate and create a common ground through film festivals to learn about their similarities.
Of course, these dynamics are an extrapolation of my observations, and whether they apply in all cases is not guaranteed. As I am nor Scottish, nor Spanish, I based my arguments on my experience and observations participating in the organisation of film festivals and attending (on my own initiative and for my own entertainment) events and screenings linked to these film festivals. The audience of these film festivals is generally composed of mainly older Scottish people with disposable income and younger international students or young people; both of these groups are interested in Spain and/or film and are also likely to participate in fundraising events.
Thus, I would like to conclude this reflexion by saying that I would have been very interested in the input of my fellow presenters in the roundtable discussion and what their perception of film festivals is. As I have no hard data or other form of sources, I based this discussion on my experience, however, there is space to develop this discussion using concepts from integration and migration studies, film distribution and cultural diplomacy, which I plan to engage with, should the opportunity to present my findings arise.
***The 5th Transatlantic Dialogue at the University of Luxembourg was planned to be held from 25th to 27th May 2020. It will be postponed until 2021.***