Towards a Global Folk Cinema

As parallel climate and public health crises highlight the extent to which the experiences of communities worldwide are inextricably connected, there is an increasing urgency to find ways of illuminating aspects of solidarity, common concern and shared experience globally across cultures and communities.

Responding to this imperative, this project will mount the first ever global study of a folk cinema both within film studies and the wider humanities, a new comparative space in which the experiences of diverse communities can be interconnected. Whilst disparate scholars have mentioned in passing the notion of a folk cinema (Gabriel (1982), Landy (1994)), there has yet to be undertaken any overarching study exploring the full implications such a notion holds globally for world cinema.

And yet: examples of a folk cinema - a cinema not only FOR the people, but OF the people, BY the people - lie scattered throughout cinema history, from the films made collectively with working class communities over half a century by Newcastle's Amber Collective, the use of cinema as a form of cultural continuity within ancient Inuit oral traditions by Zacharius Kunuk, or Alicia Rohrwacher's recent cinematic retellings of Italian folk tales.

Drawing upon an interdisciplinary framework (including aspects of culture studies, ethnology and political theory) this project will seek to illuminate previously unconnected instances of a folk cinema, highlighting important commonalities of practice and aspects of shared experience between filmmakers and traditions of cinema in very different parts of the world. In doing so, the project will propose a transformative new perspective within film studies and the wider humanities, exploring the possibility of a 'globalization from below' (Appadurai, 2001) in which global interconnectedness is theorised from the ground upwards through the establishment of cross-cultural solidarities, rather than imposed from above by the aggressive transnationalism of neoliberal capital.

In inaugurating an inclusive, cross-cultural space in which diverse community traditions, experiences and practices can be placed alongside each other in solidarity, a folk cinema will present an important counter to contemporary right-wing populisms in which community tradition tends to be rehearsed in the exclusive and protectionist terms of nativism and xenophobia.

The project will produce the first scholarly monograph to explore the global phenomenon of a folk cinema. Beyond traditional scholarly outputs, the project will also seek to explore the emergent questions of a folk cinema through aspects of research-as-practice, exploring the interface between cinema and community experience both through film exhibition practice (through two editions of a public film festival), and the complex process through which community oral traditions are translated into cinema within a localised Scottish context, through the completion of a feature-length documentary film.

Key aspects of preparatory research and production have already been undertaken, and the fellowship will afford the opportunity to write up the monograph and complete post-production on the film to the professional standard required for it to achieve the widest public impact through frontline film festivals and broadcast television.

The fellowship will also allow for crucial aspects of early career development and engagement. I will benefit from world-leading mentorship from Professor Edward Hollis (CAHSS Associate Dean of Research at UoE) and previous AHRC standard grant recipient Professor Will Higbee (University of Exeter), and from the chance to attend two research leadership courses run by Edinburgh University's Institute of Academic Development.

The fellowship will also create significant opportunities for my research to engage with a broad community of scholars, filmmakers and interested publics through two symposia, a film festival, and a public-facing website.