New Cinema Days

Our first seminar and screenings day for New Cinema Days, a public programme for anyone studying or working in experimental and new forms of cinema.

Participants delved into the world of films distribution, asked questions about funding, discovered the latest in emerging technologies and watched films produced by cutting edge technology.

Running Order

A keynote by renowned programmer, researcher and writer Jemma Desai, focusing on the following theme:

Yearning for new ways to make and circulate: towards an infrastructure of being longing.

What happens when we use the phenomenology of yearning to appraise our cultural production infrastructure? Not yearning to belong to what we have, but yearning to be longing: to embody a desire for something else?
Instead of envisaging ‘resilient’ systems that re-form, adapt and shift, might we be able to imagine systems of transmutation that can hospice old ways of being, led by new practices of longing?
What new images might appear? How might they circulate differently? In caring for our longing, what might we no longer accept and what might we fight to care for?

You can now listen here to the keynote which was produced into Ep. 16 of the AND Podcast.

This was followed by seminars hosted by industry experts on a range of topics including:

No chairs and no walls. What is a cinema building of the future? Moderated by Lisa Brooke

Who is the audience for new cinema? Moderated by Maria Palacios Cruz

What are the resources new cinema needs? Who is holding them? Moderated by Babar Suleman

The programme of short film screenings featured two UK Premieres from leading radical voices in new cinema:

GLITCHBODIES by Rebecca Merlic (UK Premiere)
An experimental film and multiplatform project exploring new forms of feminism, LGBTQ+, Drag transformations and intimate sensitive representations of the protagonists, aiming to bring them to a wider audience.

Everything but the World by DIS (UK Premiere)
A docu-sci-fi plotting new narratives for new histories, from the New York–based collective known for working across mediums and platforms.

Theta by Lawrence Lek
A film continuing Lek’s ongoing Sinofuturist universe, in which he explores questions of identity, surveillance, and empathy in the age of AI.

Credit

New Cinema Days (NCD) is a new initiative developed by Abandon Normal Devices, produced in partnership with the School of Digital Arts (SODA) at Manchester Metropolitan University and HOME in Manchester UK. Supported with public funds from Arts Council England, BFI National Lottery funding, We are UK Film and Granada Foundation, with additional support from the Italian Cultural Institute in London.

Event info:

Thu 20th Apr 2023, School of Digital Arts (SODA)

Event

New Cinema Days

Event info:

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