SSMF 2021: RUPTURE AND REPAIR

SSMF ruptures the boundary between an academic conference and a media festival, and will showcase film, audio, animations, performances, photographs, installations, immersive media, and other media forms over three days of sharing and discussion.

RUPTURE AND REPAIR

When CAMRA selected the theme of RUPTURE AND REPAIR for our 2020 Screening Scholarship Media Festival, little did we know just how relevant it would become over the course of the year. From the quick and dramatic escalation of the COVID-19 pandemic—which forced us to cancel our gathering in the Spring 2020 semester—to the nationwide protests against police brutality and racial injustice that shook the United States over the summer, we have all faced rupture and repair in personal and structural ways. While we considered the theme compelling before, it has become clear that it is particularly important, now more than ever, to engage these ideas in the face of the challenges that we have experienced in recent months.

We thus extended 2020’s theme of RUPTURE AND REPAIR, and invited additional submissions from scholars, activists, artists, filmmakers, and educators of all backgrounds that creatively explored these ideas. In addition to this year’s submissions, those who had been accepted to the 2020 event had the opportunity to resubmit the same work for automatic inclusion in the upcoming festival.

As in the previous call, we understand the theme to encompass a range of projects and perspectives about how we navigate pain, violence, struggle, trauma, and/or loss. Submissions explored different forms of rupture or breakage, be they physical, structural, environmental, emotional, symbolic, or spiritual in nature, as well as the many forms of, and approaches to, repair.

What are the possibilities and limitations of taking on creative or experimental modes of research and practice in relation to these topics? How do we depict and discuss pain and suffering sensitively and ethically? How do we represent things that appear to be unrepresentable? And how might multimodality offer new visions for repair, recovery, and reconciliation?
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In 2021, CAMRA hosted SSMF in a hybrid format. The majority of screenings and panels took place online, and the festival remained free and open to the public.
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