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Animal Nature Future Film Festival and its transnational organisational structure

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Introduction Since the 2000s the number of environmental film festivals around the globe has increased significantly; we have witnessed a diversification within eco-themed film festivals, including events focusing on wildlife and environment protection, sustainable food cultivation, animal ethics, and human/animal relations. Among these is Animal Nature Future Film Festival (ANFFF), which was established in 2023 […]

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Films flying high: International Film Festival of the Heights in Jujuy, Argentina

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Argentina is usually known for two leading film festivals: BAFICI (Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival), known for its attraction to cinephiles, and Mar del Plata International Film Festival, the only A-list festival in Latin America. However, the country has a rich circuit of film events that are little known outside its boundaries, mainly due […]

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From ASCII Art to Comic Sans: Typography and popular culture in the digital age

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Karin Wagner’s From ASCII Art to Comic Sans: Typography and Popular Culture in the Digital Age presents a fascinating exploration of how typography has been shaped and reshaped by socio-cultural and historical influences. Focusing on four distinct phenomena within the practice of typography, Wagner traces their unexpected ‘usage, design, printing as well as dispersion’ (p. […]

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Archaeology of projection and economy of the real

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Two recent books find common ground in radically rethinking the projective function of media technologies. The first is Pasi Väliaho’s Projecting Spirits: Speculation, Providence, and Early Modern Optical Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), a detailed media archaeological investigation into the role of optical and projection devices in reorganising the concept of the world at […]

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Feminist Fandoms

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Briony Hannell’s Feminist Fandoms: Media Fandom, Digital Feminism, and Tumblr (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) is an ethnographic exploration of the culture of feminist fandom found on the titular social media platform Tumblr. Hannell uses interviews with 342 participants to explore how the platform has developed a culture of feminist consciousness-raising which has, the book argues, helped […]

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A time panorama: Unpacking ‘Calculating Empires’

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Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500-2025 took place at Osservatorio Prada, Milan between 23 November 2023 and 29 January 2024. The venue proved curiously appropriate for the exhibition conceived by artists and researchers Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, engaging with a project about imperialism, control, time, politics, and technology in an intriguing, […]

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Describing a networked practice through conversation: An interview with Brooklyn J. Pakathi

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In an attempt to understand different perspectives and voices on digital art in South Africa within a Global South/Majority World context, I interviewed transmedia artist Brooklyn J. Pakathi on 2 March 2023 via Zoom to hear their views on networked online curatorial practices and how these types of practices often diffuse the line between artist […]

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On Distant Viewing

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Ten years after Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading,[1] Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton released their book Distant Viewing (MIT Press, 2023), where they explore the ‘methodological and epistemological implications of using computer vision as a tool for the study of visual messages’. (p. 11) When Moretti used his concept of ‘distant reading’, although the study of […]

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Why (film) festivals? Virtual reality experiences at a crossroads

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It was in October 2015 at Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (FNC) that I first encountered virtual reality (VR) as we know it today. Since then, I have attended every edition of the festival’s Explore section, anxious to discover what immersive and interactive experiences it had in store. Although I could never afford to attend any […]

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The two sides of VR utopias

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At the center of Lazzaretto Vecchio, the immersive island of the Venice Film Festival, there is an open social space where directors, producers, press, volunteers, and festival visitors can gather together to grab quick drinks, meet old and new friends, and sit down for interviews and/or business talks. The community space offers a relief from […]

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The many stories of cinema and cinephilia in Pakistan

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In the area of South Asian film studies, Pakistani cinema has rarely been the subject of focused and dedicated scholarship. As such, Mushtaq Gazdar’s Pakistan Cinema 1947-1997 has remained the only historical study of Pakistani cinema, its disputed origins, and its evolution from the creation of Pakistan in 1947 until the late 20th century. In […]

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The post-pandemic festival: Identity, crisis, and curation at Sheffield DocFest 2022

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Sheffield DocFest, the UK’s largest documentary festival, returned this year for its first predominantly in-person edition following two years of pared back, online, and hybrid editions in 2020 and 2021. Returning in June 2022 as a six-day event comparable in size and scale to the 2019 festival, this year’s edition was framed in part as […]

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NECSUS – Call for book reviews

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For the book review section in NECSUS, we are currently looking for contributions for the Spring and Autumn 2023 issues – focusing on either one publication or bringing two or more publications into a dialogue with each other. The book review section in NECSUS publishes critical writing on recent publications that fall within the broad […]

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Film festivals and market intelligence: From audience surveys to data analytics?    

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Audience research has become an increasingly significant aspect of film festivals. The development of hybrid and online film festivals has enabled opportunities to generate more knowledge about the festival audience. That resembles broader developments in today’s culture and society, which relies on online data to take audience knowledge to a higher level. Indeed, industry observers […]

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Itineraries of walking and footwear on film

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Over the past two decades, there has been growing scholarly interest in walking, as evidenced by an increasing number of publications, workshops (or sometimes ‘walkshops’), and other events dedicated to the topic. In this review, I focus on two recent volumes that can be positioned within this growing interest, but particularly contributing to the field […]

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Recent News

Editorial Board

Martine Beugnet
University of Paris 7 Diderot

Greg de Cuir Jr
University of Arts Belgrade

Ilona Hongisto
University of Helsinki

Judith Keilbach
Universiteit Utrecht

Skadi Loist
Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf

Toni Pape
University of Amsterdam

Maria A. Velez-Serna
University of Stirling

Andrea Virginás 
Babeș-Bolyai University

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NECS–European Network for Cinema and Media Studies is a non-profit organization bringing together scholars, archivists, programmers and practitioners.

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