Cinematic Activism: Grassroots Film Festivals and Social Movements in Pandemic Times

Leftist activists have developed virtual, film festival-informed practices of "cinematic activism" in order to grow and strengthen social movements amid the overlapping political and public health crises of the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether through a festival's self-identification as "activist,"¹ or through a would-be spectator's protest of a festival's political, financial, or ideological ties,² film festivals yield dynamic spaces for research on social justice activism. They exemplify how the components of text, spectatorship, and exhibition are packaged and structured to achieve activist aims of consciousness raising, accountability, and mobilization. I am drawn to activist film festivals, both as a spectator and a researcher, because they are lively sites of cultural production and representation that rely on a high level of social engagement. To that end, film festival participation produces a certain kind of energy. That energy largely derives from the physical proximity of theatrical experience and its adjacent social spaces: the post-screening discussion session, the theater lobby, the afterparty, or the bar across the street. In the context of small, volunteer, and social justice-oriented film festivals, that energy is often the driving force for community congregation and social movement mobilization.

However, in the earliest months of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought most social life and cultural activity to a grinding halt across the United States as various state and local governments placed social-distancing restrictions on businesses like restaurants, bars, and movie theaters.³ In the context of an uncontrolled pandemic, the traditional mode of festival-going became a public health threat. This threat deprives us of the intimacy of sitting close to strangers in a darkened theater, sharing the emotive experiences of joy, sorrow, laughter, disgust, and whatever bodily fluids (tears, mucus) may accompany those feelings. The pre- and post-screening social hours—comingling in cramped indie theater lobbies or grabbing a beer at the dive bar next door to carry on in debate—likewise become impossibilities under such circumstances. Traditional engagements with cinema culture during the protracted and uncertain early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic placed activist film festivals in an interesting position of simultaneous precarity and unruly possibility. As festival organizers reconfigured their events for virtual exhibition, they also faced the challenge of figuring out how to maintain the energy of the in-person experience and then harness that energy into political action.

Amid the lockdowns and grueling physical isolation of the first half of 2020, a real need materialized for some form of remote social engagement that could help mobilize people around a simultaneous political crisis: the pandemic of lethal police brutality against Black people. After the lynching of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement again became the focus of U.S. media and political discourse as thousands of protesters demonstrated throughout the United States (the COVID-19 pandemic be damned). This confluence of events—the closure of businesses and restrictions on in-person activity alongside the urgency and resurgence of public protest against white supremacist state violence—amplified the need for media to mobilize social movements. More specifically, a virtual, cinema-based mode of activism informed by grassroots film festival practices has emerged as a strategic method for keeping communities engaged. Virtual cinematic activism has broadened outreach in response to the overlapping political crises of COVID-19, anti-Black police brutality, and other forms of neoliberal and biopolitical state violence in the United States and in places such as occupied Palestine.

I call this formation "cinematic activism" to highlight the virtual mediation of global grassroots social movements. I use this term polemically to describe the strategies and methods that leftist activists and artists have employed to maintain political energy during the COVID-19 pandemic. I further offer "cinematic activism" instead of the more widely used "media activism" for two distinct reasons. First, a practice of cinematic activism appeals to longstanding commitments to cinema culture, by which I mean that an imagined community of spectators constitute an audience, commune over...