Following on from a successful panel discussion at ID Screening Days 2024, Nadia M. Oliva explores how organisations can navigate programming and conversations that reflect their values while assessing the risks and challenges of operating in the charged era of contemporary discourse.
Cinema offers us a lens on the world. As an intrinsically empathic medium, film has the ability to put an individual in another person’s shoes, stir debate and create structures of feeling that cultivate shared knowledge and common ground.
It’s worth remembering that as film programmers and cultural workers, we can shape what that lens looks like. Platforming bold filmmaking voices isn’t just good for business, but has the potential to change our audience’s minds or at least help them form opinions.
Standing at a crossroads
Within a rapid news cycle, cancel culture and all of the emotional tensions that go along with it, of course it can be tempting to remain silent or actively avoid taking part in challenging discourse. This can come from a fear of doing the wrong thing, sidelining audiences who are paying attention to our work, or — practically speaking — a fear of getting your funding pulled or having to face off with sponsors who may not share your organisation’s views.
In the last several months alone, a cinema in London issued a statement around cancelling their annual Eurovision party, resulting in their risk of closure by the Charity Commission, another cinema had two famous filmmakers publicly drop their patronage of the space after the cinema announced some choice programming, another cinema faced backlash after announcing some of their toilets would be gender neutral.
While I’m being deliberately vague here, it’s probably clear that these are examples surrounding acts of support for Palestinian liberation, and the anti-trans rhetoric around toilet use. Of course, there are many examples of how organisations might “take a stance” on something, but I’m illustrating these here to shed light on the real attention that should be paid to how and why we use our platforms, and the real risks involved.
It’s also worth noting that for communities and identities that are already underrepresented in the creative sector, engaging in the film world can already feel like sticking out like a sore thumb. With so many film organisations inadequately engaging with challenging conversations — many of which are centred around these same underrepresented communities — how can we best navigate how to end institutional complicity, and offer up a framework for meaningful solidarity with audiences actively facing discrimination, oppression and violence?
As we continue to face a moveable feast of socio-political tumult and growing calls to action, how can cultural workers and film organisations responsibly contribute to conversations that matter?
What follows will be more questions than answers — there’s no “how-to” book for this — but I hope to present some provocations on how we can think through our own values and decision-making, and unpack how we stand by those decisions as programmers and cultural workers. The hope is to align our values with our behaviours, both as individuals and as part of the organisations we work with.
Finding your guide
Our first stop on this tour is to think through your own core values, and to do the work to identify the guiding ethics that might serve as your lighthouse when you make decisions.
In film programming, we often talk about developing our ‘curatorial lens’ — oftentimes that refers to artistic taste, but upon closer inspection, even the notion of ‘artistic taste’ is an arrow pointing towards the intersecting identities, perspectives and lived experiences that got you where you are. Film programming is hard! And largely unsustainable. I don’t know anyone who has just wandered into the field (we’re not in it for the money, folks, that’s for sure) — it takes passion and drive to make it work at all.
While the idea of “finding your ‘why’” might sound trite, it’s nonetheless a good place to start. Who are you, what are your biases and leanings? How does this inform how you (want to, and do) show up as a film programmer or cultural worker?
When I spoke to Clare Reddington (CEO of Watershed Cinema, Bristol) in June 2024 about setting up Pervasive Media Studios at Watershed, she said she tore a page out of academic Jon Brown’s book, who said “to do anything exciting and challenging, you need to work with people who are not like you.”
Clare then spoke about how she approached this idea: “To do that, you have to really think about and declare your values, and also what kind of partners and communities you are looking for. When we set up the Studio, we said it was open and generous, with two founding principles: we give space and resources to artists; and we require openness and generosity. That is where I started. I realised over time that generosity and openness mean different things to different people, and we would have to be very nuanced if we wanted to be intersectional about openness and generosity.”
Exploring your values from the get-go and having this knowledge as your seatbelt as you navigate this field is the most useful and grounding tool in your toolkit.
When it comes to affecting change in organisations, there are three streams through which change usually occurs, and most often in tandem:
People: Through values, education, training, hiring practices
Policy: Setting targets, creating processes and systems
Practice: Following through on things, and being intentional as you do them
All of these things come into play when a group is trying to decide how to act upon something, and deciding what shape an action will take.
When the ongoing attacks on Gaza ramped up last year, one festival said they immediately moved budget around, shifted programming and ultimately incorporated several Palestine-related touchpoints (films & events) into the programme. Film festival programmers and programming collectives I spoke to for this piece said that they feel empowered to make decisions that might be deemed “controversial” because they’re grounded in who they are as an organisation.
How to take action might look different in different contexts. A one-off social media statement will come across as disingenuous or virtue signalling if the support for an issue isn’t anywhere to be found elsewhere in the org’s ethos or programming — it’s important to assess what an ongoing engagement with a particular topic looks like, rather than insular measures of solidarity. Instead, many agreed that it’s useful to put their politics in the programming itself.
Moving forward
Of course, there are risks to this work, which can range from properly safeguarding front-line staff who face the backlash head-on, to rocking the boat with funders who have the power to pull funding or cause loss of employment. It’s a slow down moment to calculate this risk — for yourself or for an organisation — and it’s alright to leave space for the decision that it’s not in one’s best interest to do anything at all.
Nonetheless, the larger question to ask on an ongoing basis is one of how often you and/or your group engages in personal reflection, and in tandem, post-mortems on what you’ve practiced. Ultimately, whose comfort are you privileging in the decisions you make?
In their book Emergent Strategy, community organiser adrienne maree brown calls our work for change “science fictional behaviour”, which is being concerned with the way our actions and beliefs now, today, will shape the future, tomorrow, and the next generations. It’s about getting excited by what we can create and believing it’s possible to create another world.
It sounds like a tall order, because it is — but as film people who inhabit all sorts of different worlds every day, who better to have these conversations?
Nadia M. Oliva is a film, culture and talks curator and writer with a passion for amplifying bold, diverse voices. Her prior work includes programming at Netflix, BAFTA, BFI and the Toronto International Film Festival.
Ig & X (Twitter): @nadiamoliva