The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many delays and cancellations. We must identify new ways to "be" together and reimagine how we do events. For this reason, the Feminist Border Arts Film Festival is putting together a mini film fest and social justice zine exhibition that will be streamable/read only for one weekend in early May. The event is entitled: "Pandemic Pop Up! A Virtual Fest & Streaming Exhibition" and is sponsored by Gender & Sexuality Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies Department at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
Calling all filmmakers, artists, zinesters, and all creatives—how about a pop-up mini-streaming film & virtual zine fest?
We can do a quick call with a fast turnaround. Selected film entries are official selections that we will stream for a weekend and selected digitized zines will be exhibited online during the same duration. Let’s do this! Let’s make this happen together! (None of your work will be downloadable. We will use a date-specific, read/stream-only Dropbox links.)
Themes
The FBAFF is a social justice arts organization. We seek films that bring together artistic insight and technique with social awareness and representations of difference. Our pandemic pop-up mini-fest seeks to continue to broadly explore such perspectives. We are especially attuned to the stories/work of people of color, women, migrants, non-U.S. peoples, U.S. peoples, all trans and non-binary peoples, queer sexualities and identities, disabled folks, environmentally focuses people, folks dealing with food insecurity and homelessness, the working poor, and more. We seek creative works that can operate alongside and expand the culture work we are currently undertaking (for example, check out Dr. Jonet’s pandemic creativity podcast & sound art installation and additions to the digital resources page we are maintaining at genders.nmsu.edu/pandemic-2020-digital-resources). Let’s take a moment to focus on our new realities, reflect, and create. And, if you already have pieces in the works that can address the new reality or speak boldly of the old, those entries are welcome, too.
Held on the campus of New Mexico State University, the Feminist Border Arts Film Festival celebrates the power of cinema as a creative tool to reflect upon urgent social issues and thought-provoking representations of identity and difference. The festival emphasizes artistic vision in telling these stories through short film (15 min. and under), including live-action narrative, documentary, essay film, video art, experimental film, and animation. The festival showcases student, indie, and professional filmmakers, domestic and international.
Located in New Mexico—a state that includes nineteen sovereign Pueblo nations and is situated less than 50 miles from the U.S./Mexico border—the Feminist Border Arts Film Festival is committed to thinking about margins and liminal experience. The festival defines “feminist border arts” as a practice that challenges the limits of conventional representation through telling stories from the edge; threshold visions from the margins that create new ways of seeing, that visualize underrepresented ways of knowing. Selected films revive the promise of cinema, the possibility of film to open minds, create new vistas, and challenge dehumanizing forms of representation.
Gender & Sexuality Studies/Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at New Mexico State University sponsor the event in collaboration with the University Art Museum.
Gender & Sexuality Studies at NMSU offers a major, minor, and graduate minor. Students can complete requirements for the major online or in face-to-face courses. See gender.nmsu.edu for further details.
*Cover Image by Laura Anh Williams. Logo by Cassandra Dixon.*
Festival goers and event organizers will select festival favorites. FBAFF is a highly selective film festival. Each year fewer than 1% of submitted films are accepted because we curate all festival programing to both undergird and expand upon the research and teaching missions of NMSU's Gender & Sexuality Studies academic program.