Jewish film festivals are central to the discourse of 'Jewish film': they have contributed significantly to the assertion of the term from within film culture and are places for discursivating the subject matter as well as negotiating Jewish perspectives and cultures. Through their selection of films, Jewish film festivals can both influence the understanding of 'Jewish film' and construct benchmarks of which films are considered worth watching, and thus they can also participate in the creation of a (Jewish) film canon. From the first edition of the Jewish Film Festival in San Francisco in 1981 until today, the number has grown to almost 180 Jewish film festivals. Nevertheless, they still constitute a desideratum of (film festival) research.
The dissertation project aims, firstly, to systematically catalogue film festivals as a worldwide phenomenon and analyse their emergence and history. Secondly, this cataloguing will be supplemented by case studies in order to develop a typology of Jewish film festivals. In doing so, the programming work - among other things, through the selection processes of the films, the curation and the representation of 'Jewish film' in the festival materials, such as programme booklets, posters, trailers - will be systematically analysed through a yet-to-be-developed coding strategy using a database to be created.
It will be examine here, firstly, what Jewish film festivals understand as their subject matter and how they represent and convey it; secondly, which films are screened at (several) Jewish film festivals and are consequently regarded as Jewish films (I call such a development the 'Jewish vita' of the films); thirdly, which discursive spaces emerge in the process and to what extent specifically Jewish themes are negotiated in these discourses; finally, to what extent Jewish film festivals participate in the writing of a Jewish film history through their activities - including film retrospectives.
- Project lead: Lucy Pizaña
- Contact: lucy.pizana@filmuniversitaet.de
- CV: Lucy Pizaña, born in Mexico City in 1990, studied Film Cultural Heritage in the master’s programme at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf and Film and Theatre Studies (BA) at the Freie Universität Berlin. She has worked over the years in the organization and programming of various film festivals - including the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) and the International Short Film Festival interfilm Berlin. She has also been involved in organizing conferences, in film distribution and at the DEFA Foundation. Lucy is currently employed as research associate at the research group "What is Jewish Film?" at the Film University Babelsberg, where she is also a PhD-student researching on Jewish Film Festivals.
- Websites: https://juedischefilmgeschichte.de/, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucypizanaperez/
- PhD Advisors:
- Scientific PhD in the discipline: Media Studies