Film Festivals and War: A Fe-Male Perspective (1939–present)

A transdisciplinary project traversing cultural history, film and film festival studies, gender studies and digital humanities, FESTWAR FM will offer the first sustainable analysis of film festivals (FF) and war from a gender perspective.

Despite numerous examples of women’s involvement in wartime FFs, no global study has yet analysed their roles in FFs in the context of ongoing wars, nor theorised what we might learn from it.

The project will break new ground by investigating FF’s evolution as places of memory in conflict situations with a specific focus on women’s position within this process.

This will be done through three case studies connected to three armed conflicts that have occurred in Europe since the creation of the world's first FF in Venice in 1932: WWII (1939-1945), Yugoslavia (1991-1999), and Ukraine (2014-present).

The research will compare global responses to these wars through analysis of the world’s five most prestigious ‘A-list’ FFs (Venice, Cannes, Berlin, Toronto, Sundance), with the European and local response of the major FFs operating in the war affected Yugoslavia (Pula, Belgrade, Sarajevo) and Ukraine (Kyiv, Odesa).

The analysis will be organized around three categories (CAT): CAT1 – (wo)men on the screen and behind the cameras; CAT2 – (wo)men in decision-making structures; CAT3 – (wo)men on the stage and the red carpet.

The project will produce a monograph, two academic articles and an online digital archive (ODA) including a) a data visualisation chart, b) a selection of film extracts, photographs and archival materials illustrating each case study, and c) a podcast with interviews with women engaged in analysed FFs during wars in Yugoslavia and Ukraine.

In doing so, it will introduce a gendered innovation in the field of war-related FF studies, enable digitisation and digital distribution of knowledge, data and sources, and provide a public space for (marginalised) women’s voices in line with the EC Gender Equality Strategy 2020–2025.