Utopian Montage: exploring transnational folk cinemas online during the Covid-19 pandemic as part of the 2020 Folk Film Gathering film festival

Abstract

This essay explores some of the simultaneous limitations and affordances the Covid-19 pandemic has created for emergent perspectives upon a transnational folk cinema. Merging aspects of more traditional scholarly enquiry with the research-by-practice embodied within Scotland's Folk Film Gathering film festival, we position two case studies - of Nadir Bouhmouch's Amussu (2020) and the Amber Collective's Like Father (2001) respectively - within some of the broader question underlying attempts to bring the conviviality of community-focussed filmmaking and cinema-going online during the pandemic.

Keywords

• Folk
• transnational
• populism
• the people
• film festivals