2020 Presentations
Powerpoints and presentations are available for registered 2020 attendees to download here. The password to download was shared in a post-conference email to all delegates.
2020 Conference Goals
I. Accountability and Responsibility
As an international alliance of cinemas and film festivals, we recognize our role as curators of the public imagination and work to sustain the art house as a thinking space and sanctuary for documentation and representation of the human experience. We acknowledge our power as exhibitors and commit to leaning beyond conventional models towards a more equitable framework in operations, programming, leadership, and representation.
II. Politics of Aesthetics
There has been a recent tendency to split film appreciation and interpretation into aesthetic OR political camps. It’s important to emphasize that all art is political. Every visual, narrative, and technological choice is political. Coming together to watch and discuss films is political, and the choices of who guides those discussions and how are also political. It’s important to move beyond calls for representation and towards aesthetic analysis of every choice (even, or especially, the choices to be “anti-political” or to replicate dominant and usual forms without interrogation).
III. Place & Proximity
What role do our physical locations play in our institutional identities? How are our decisions, both on and off the screen, influenced and informed by the public? How may we better recognize our economic, social, and cultural impact? As place-based organizations, we have a tremendous responsibility to the people who entrust us with their stories and spaces. How may we ensure that a plurality of perspectives inform our community-based work, moving beyond transactional relationships towards equitable partnerships?
IV. Sustainability
There is an urgent need to make sure our environments are sustainable: ecologically, financially, and culturally. How are we dealing with changing marketplaces and new ways of promotion and communication? What small and big daily choices are we making to create less waste and damage? Are lived, shared cultural experiences more sustainable than individual cultural consumption? If our organizations want to widen their cultural reach, how do our workplaces reflect that desired outcome? Can we change that workplace by hiring new people and forming new partnerships? If so, are those relationships and new hires sustainable?
V. Radical Imagination
Change requires imagination. As film professionals we are in a privileged position to be inspired daily by the art of the cinema: past, present and future. In honor of this chosen field, we commit to pursuing creative decision making.