Learning on ScreenThe Radical Film Network
The Radical Film Network: Sustaining Alternative Film Culture: Dr Steve Presence gives us an insight into the RFN’s beginnings and upcoming projects and festivals.
About the Author:
Dr Steve Presence is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Moving Image Research at the University of the West of England (UWE) Bristol. His research interests include political film culture, documentary and the UK film and television industries. He is a founding co-director of the Bristol Radical Film Festival, convenor of the Radical Film Network and Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded project, ‘Sustaining Alternative Film Cultures’. He has published a number of articles and book chapters, most recently in Film Studies journal and the Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics (2016), and is working on his first monograph.
This two-year (2015-17) AHRC-funded International Networking Scheme project is run in collaboration the Radical Film Network (www.radicalfilmnetwork.com), an international network run by and for organisations and individuals involved in politically-engaged and/or aesthetically innovative film culture.
Radical film culture has expanded rapidly in recent years as access to digital technologies has meshed with political, economic and environmental contexts marked by crisis and discontent. From experimental drama-docs (Out on the Street) to anarchist agit-prop (It’s the End of the World As We Know It and I Feel Fine), and from participatory distribution platforms (visionOntv) to grassroots, volunteer-run film festivals (London Feminist Film Festival), progressive, committed cinema is being produced and circulated by organisations around the world in new and exciting ways. Yet despite – or perhaps because of – its rapid growth, radical film culture is dispersed and fragmented: organisations often operate in isolation from one another, unaware of previous groups that have come before them or the wider traditions of which they are a part, and struggle along with little resources and zero funding.
The RFN was designed to help address this problem, and was founded in 2013 by a group of activists, academics, filmmakers and programmers involved in radical film culture in the UK. The aim was to develop a network that would help put those involved in contemporary radical film culture in touch with one another and with previous generations of radical film-makers and activists, and that would support its growth and sustainability in the UK and elsewhere. Since then the RFN has expanded significantly, and currently comprises more than one hundred organisations across twenty countries, ranging from artists’ studios and production collectives to archives, community film co-ops, distributors, film festivals and exhibition venues. Information about each of these organisations is available from their respective profiles on the network’s Directory, which is hosted on the RFN website, and which links out to their own sites. The RFN’s Mailing List, Facebook and Twitter accounts, meanwhile, enable those organisations and other stakeholders involved with radical film culture to share information and ideas around the world. The network held its inaugural conference in Birmingham in February 2015. A second ‘RFN Unconference and Film Festival’ takes place in Glasgow in May (see https://rfnscotland.org/).
