Conference
13 - 19 April 2016
Royal Holloway, University of London
Kisses, Lance Daly (2008) Image Courtesy of Fastnet Films
The final conference of the Leverhulme Trust funded international research project Childhood and Nation in World Cinema: Borders and Encounters Since 1980 next week, 18 and 19 April 2016.
Brining together scholars from around the world to explore how childhood and nation is depicted on screen, the conference aims to take forward children’s perceptions of, and involvement in, screen representation. At the same time, this project acknowledges the importance of the child in figuring ideas of nationhood in adult cultural and social consciousness, as it is explored through film.
Building on the work of the project, and previous events at the University of New South Wales (Australia) Ningbo Institute of Technology at Zhejiang University (China) and the University of Cambridge, the conference includes keynote speakers Professor Daniela Berghahn from Royal Holloway’s Department of Media Arts and Professors Karen Lury and David Martin-Jones from the University of Glasgow.
Visit the Childhood and Nation in World Cinema website for the full schedule, profiles of speakers and abstracts.
Conference
10 - 11 July 2014
Birkbeck College, University of London
Rosy Martin performing the memory of her mother
I was recently invited to give a Keynote address on 'Diasporic Families and the Production of Locality in European Cinema' at the Picturing the Family conference. Papers and artist presentations at this conference explored how concepts of family and alternative forms of kinship have been acted out, reinvented, or deconstructed, through various media including the visual arts, literature, and museum exhibitions, across the centuries. The family picture was considered both in its figurative and artefactual forms, including literature, film and photography.
Public Lecture
11 - 11 March 2013
Royal Holloway, University of London, Main Lecture Theatre, Founder's Building
All Welcome. Admission free.
The Lecture starts at 6.15pm and is followed by a Reception in the Picture Gallery
RSVP to Sue.Heath@rhul.ac.uk
In the age of globalisation, diasporic and other types of transnational family are increasingly represented on film, yet they have been neglected in film studies. Building on her extensive work on migrant and diasporic European cinema, Professor Daniela Berghahn will examine the cinematic representation of British Asian, Maghrebi French and Turkish German families. She sees the preponderance of family narratives as related to the family’s dual function as a prime site of identity formation and as a trope of belonging. By affirming or challenging prevalent media images about immigrants and ethnic minorities, films about diasporic families make important contributions to wider socio-political debates about immigration, cultural diversity and the success or failure of multiculturalism in Europe.
Conference
27 - 27 April 2012
Royal Holloway, University of London
An international, interdisciplinary postgraduate conference at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Keynote speakers
Professor Robin Cohen (Emeritus Professor and Principal Investigator of the Leverhulme Oxford Diasporas Programme, University of Oxford)
'Before the Welcoming: The Origins of Difference, the Beginnings of Convergence'
Professor Stephanie Hemelryk Donald (RMIT University, Melbourne and Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the Centre for World Cinema, University of Leeds)
'The Dorothy Complex: Children and Migration in World Cinema'
Screening
18 January 2012
Ciné Lumière, 17 Queensberry Place, London (South Kensington)
Sibling film-making duo Yasemin Samdereli and sister Nesrin will be at a special screening of their film Almanya - Welcome To Germany, to discuss their humorous and yet sensitive take on immigration and integration of a Turkish family living in Germany. The comedy offers a heart-warming tale of fictional guest worker number one-million-and-one who, together with his sprawling family, made Germany his new home.
Almanya – Welcome to Germany premiered at the International Film Festival in Berlin in 2011, the year which marked the 50th anniversary of the recruitment agreement that saw hundreds of thousands of Turkish “guest workers” move to Germany. It has since won numerous prizes, including the prestigious German Film Prize for the best screenplay and is the commercially most successful Turkish German film to date, attracting over 1.4 million viewers in Germany alone.
The event is organised by Professor Daniela Berghahn as part of the HARC Fellowship 'Welcoming Strangers' which she currently holds at Royal Holloway. She will introduce the screening with a presentation entitled 'Families in Motion: Migration with a Touch of Magic'.
The Samdereli sisters will share their experiences of life as Turkish-Germans and what drove them to ask the question “Am I German or Turkish” through the narrative of the film during the special screening at the Ciné Lumiére, in London, on Wednesday 18 January.
In their film, the issue of multiple and amivalent allegiances is addressed by six-year-old Cenk Yilmaz, who is upset when neither his Turkish nor his German schoolmates select him for their football teams. His 22-year-old secretly-pregnant cousin Canan steps in to comfort Cenk with the story of how their grandfather Hüseyin came to Germany in the mid-sixties and later brought his wife and children to live with him in Almanya.
Not unlike the British-Asian box-office hits East is East and Bend It Like Beckham, which are also comedies about immigrant families, Almanya – Welcome to Germany invites audiences all over the world to recognize that families, whether they were born and bred in Britain or Germany or come from South Asia or Turkey, have a great deal in common. The experience of family life is one that unites humanity and that, therefore, has the capacity to build bridges across cultures and to help us reassess racial, religious and other stereotypes.
The Welcoming Strangers Event on 18 January 2012 will start at 6.30pm.
You can watch the trailer and book your tickets online (£4 / £6) now at:
http://www.institut-francais.org.uk/films/almanya-welcome-to-germany
The Welcoming Strangers Event has been generously supported by HARC at Royal Holloway, the Goethe Institute and the Ciné Lumière.
Conference
21 May 2011
Conference at SOAS, University of London, film screening at Ciné Lumière
From Visconti’s classic tale about urban migration in Rocco and His Brothers and Coppola’s Godfather Trilogy, through mainstream family romances such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge to popular or critically acclaimed depictions of diasporic domesticity in East is East, Inch’ Allah Dimanche and Die Fremde, the family assumes a prominent place in cinematic narratives about the dynamics of postmodern multiculturalism and transnational mobility.The conference will provide a platform for dialogue with filmmakers and other media professionals who engage with issues of cultural diversity. It aims to explore how media practitioners negotiate between their artistic ambitions, the demands of the public funding bodies and the market in their construction of diasporic family life on screen and how these films intervene with ongoing media debates about hegemonic and minority cultures in Western societies.
Podcasts of this conference are available here.
Conference
10 - 13 March 2011
Ritz-Carlton, New Orleans, USA
The panel 'Citizens of Plural Worlds: Family and Nation in the Age of Globalisation', examines the representation of the family both as a social institution and as a trope of the nation-state and post-national belonging. The four papers focus on families in Bombay cinema (during the 1950s and post-1990), contemporary European film and Asian-British reality television. The transnational comparison of the institution of the family suggests that kinship is an issue of universal significance but that the structures (nuclear, multi-generational, incomplete and surrogate families based on voluntary affiliations, etc.) and the value systems that underpin family life are always culturally specific. Equally universal is the use of familial tropes (fatherland, Mother India, etc.) to naturalise hierarchical structures of power and subordination, be it within the context of nation states, under colonial rule and during decolonisation and globalisation. The trope of the family is deployed as a highly dynamic discursive device to comment upon our rapidly shifting understanding of citizenship in the age of heightened transnational migration and globalisation.
