About

This doctoral project will undertake a critical study of filmmaking “laboratories” and their role in the international arthouse film circuit, tracing their emergence in the 2000s and 2010s through to their continued operation and—I hope to argue—their waning significance and prestige. These labs, sometimes designated as “workshops”, permit filmmakers to share and gather feedback about their unfinished projects from industry professionals, most often at the stage of treatment and scriptwriting but also, at times, after having advanced through to production or post-production. Little studied, despite the considerable influence they have played in both the funding and style of 21st century arthouse cinema, this project will offer not only an examination of their history and analysis of their structures, but will consider broader questions of political economy and neocolonialism, given the emphasis on many of these labs to support work from the so-called “global south” by way of prize money and opportunities for lucrative co-production deals with “Western” nations.

A major node in the development and production of feature narratives and documentaries, these labs or workshops exist to not only connect filmmakers and producers with international (often Western) colleagues for the sake of co-production and distribution deals, but also—and I would argue increasingly—to provide feedback to the film teams about the content and form of the work itself. To this extent, as part of this study I wish to consider what we might call a “labification” of arthouse style—in which narrative and aesthetics are directly tailored to the tastes and expectations of Western funders, co-producers, sales agents, film festival programmers, and assumed audiences—as well as an emerging postcolonial rejection of such norms by filmmakers and producers