Film festival and the Rhythm of Social Inclusivity: The Fluid Spaces of London and Florence indian Film festivals

The aim of this article is to boldly present the creative, social and cultural influences on spaces and urban quarters, that fairly new Film Festival tendencies have produced, and consequently, how these venues can be thought to interlock with discourses on ethnic compartmentalization and fluidity of city spaces.

In order to discuss the above, this paper intends to take the London Indian Film Festival and the Italian River to River Florence Indian Film Festival as case studies, both of which intend to give a voice to the abounding Indian film industry, well disconnected by the glamour and glitter of the more popular Hindi cinema, viz. Bollywood. By borrowing the notion of fluid modernity as introduced by Bauman, this paper intends to argue that spaces such as film festivals are not static events, but rather dynamic and socially including.

Zygmunt Bauman introduced the notion of liquid modernity to better understand the condition of constant mobility and change in terms of relationships, identities and global economies within the contemporary society. Liquid modernity is here employed to discuss how film festival venues could be a creative-cultural device that activates social integration and redefines urban geographies. Through the notion of liquid modernity, film festivals are here intended to be framed as cursors for ethnic mobilization rejecting compartmentalization and substantiating that the construction of a durable and coherent identity over time and space becomes increasingly impossible. In this light, the final goal is to decode Film Festivals as a powerful cultural tool to allow a fluid understanding of the city space.