Cinema and Audiovisual Futures Conference 2024

For the last 120 years, cinema has held a dominant position as a creative and entertainment medium, a cultural institution, and an audiovisual language for understanding ourselves and our world. How will cinema's significance evolve in the years to come? How does cinema imagine its own survival, especially in response to the environmental and societal crises that pose threats to the survival of humanity and the planet?

The Cinema and Audiovisual Futures Conference is a new initiative to explore the future of cinema at Locarno Film Festival. This partnership between the Locarno Film Festival and Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) with support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) connects audiovisual innovation to social and environmental responsibility. As part of its larger mission to discover and support new directions for cinema, Locarno Film Festival offers an exciting environment to convene the world's leading scholars in film and media, serving as a platform to set a research agenda to assess and define the future of the field. 

This year's conference, taking place from 13 to 16 August, focuses on the main theme of Cinematic Survival, elaborated through three modes of survival: Digital Survival, Social Survival, and Environmental Survival. For three days, the conference will host approximately 50 scholars, students, filmmakers and artists. Following the USI cinema research group's specialisation in video essays as practice-based research, the conference will provide a platform for the intersection of theory and practice. The program will include a videographic workshop in which participants have the opportunity to contribute to the production of audiovisual outputs related to their research and critical positions.

While the main conference is for invited specialists, there will be three public evening sessions (August 13-15) in which leading artists, thinkers and audiovisual innovators bring the insights of the conference to a wide audience. These encounters are free and open to all. More details about the three public events are available by clicking on the following links: The Future of Survival Public Event: AI and Generative humanity, The Future of Survival Public Event: Digital Migrations, and The Future of Survival Public event: "Listening to Ice"; as well as on the Locarno Film Festival website, and by contacting the conference organisers.

Conference Organisers:

Kevin B. Lee ([email protected])

Libertad Gills ([email protected])

Evelyn Kreutzer ([email protected])

Silvia Cipelletti ([email protected])