Film Festivals as Cosmopolitan Assemblages: A Case Study in Diasporic Cocreation

This chapter aims at discussing film festivals within the wider discourse of cosmopolitan studies and the growing proliferation and visibility of independent Indian films at film festivals in major cities in the UK, such as London and Leicester. In doing so, cosmopolitanism will be used as a lens to appraise Indie curation in film festivals as affected by a multitude of constituencies. In order to assess film festivals as formed by a variety of cosmopolitan manifestations, I will look at the intersecting nature of film festivals as events, at their programming choices and strategies, at audience responses and at the importance of the filmic texts they exhibit. In doing so, I will start by assessing some recent literature on cosmopolitanism in order to formulate a notion of ‘cosmopolitan assemblage’ that is inspired by the idea of multiple manifestations of cosmopolitanism and by the vision of a universe united in diversity (Fiala, 2017: 93). The notion of cosmopolitan assemblage will explain the complexity of identity-based film festivals, particularly those showcasing new Indian Indie films, seen as not merely events based on questions of imagined communities (Iordanova, 2009a, 2013), but more completely as events based on a variety of cosmopolitan phenomena.