Film Matters Magazine

Department of English
University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada
18-19 May 2018

At a Q&A that followed a Toronto screening of Little Men (2016), a film about two families’ battle over a lease and its impact on the lives of its central protagonists, director Ira Sachs reflected on the modern-day struggle of many families to remain in the middle class. Sachs’s film speaks to the primacy of economics in discourse. Recent scholarship has shown the value of reading film and literature economically. The enormously influential work of David Graeber, Mary Poovey, Margot C. Finn, Julian Hoppit, Sandford Borins, Audrey Jaffe, Margaret Atwood, and others have opened up new avenues for thinking about money and the humanities. This conference aims both to consolidate and to advance criticism in literature, film, philosophy, and cultural studies by attending to some incarnations of debt and analyzing their wider implications.

Abstracts of 250 words (with 50-word biographies) for 20-minute papers are invited on any aspect of economics and the humanities, as are proposals for panels of three or four papers on clearly defined themes. Submissions on creative projects that link research and creative writing and/or performance are warmly encouraged. Selected proceedings of academic work will be published in a special issue of the peer-reviewed e-journal Literature Compass (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1741-4113).

Possible themes and topics:

• Capitalism
• Capital
• Inheritance
• Faith
• Credibility
• Chance
• Marxism
• Interest
• Commerce
• Trade
• Liberalism
• Finances
• Housing
• Rent
• Mortgage
• Banks
• Credit
• Debit
• Ranking
• Poverty
• Labour
• Forgiveness
• Cash
• Stocks
• Forgery
• Political Economy
• Colonialism
• Wealth

The first deadline for submissions is 1 August 2017. Details of keynote speakers, roundtables, performances, and film screenings will be announced, as they become available, on our conference Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/DebtinHistory/) and on Twitter @DebtinHistory. Queries, proposals, and suggestions for collaboration may be directed to Dr Tom Ue at: ue_tom AT hotmail.com. This project is supported by the Department of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship.

During the month of April, Filmatique will screen films from a constellation of post-Soviet nations — Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and the Republic of Georgia. These countries have all declared independence in the wake of the disintegration of the former USSR.  However, remnants of a fallen empire, to which they all once belonged, pervade the region’s collective consciousness to this day.

Filmatique’s Post-Soviet Cinema Series posits a fundamental question: how to interpret borders that reveal themselves as arbitrary— imaginary and constantly shifting lines between one country and the next, between the colonial past and a way forward, between the preservation of traditional ways of life and a diaspora of young people who seek out the promise of urban life. This dualism is present in the series’s first film— Heavenly Nomadic — which captures the rhythms of Kyrgyzstan’s paradisiacal mountain gorges. True Noon and Nabat depict rural life on the brink of disappearance, while Adventure and Keep Smiling portray urban desperation in Almaty and Tbilisi.

Often, the protagonists are women forced to survive by whatever means they can. Filmatique’s Post-Soviet Cinema Series showcases exciting new voices from an oft-forgotten part of the world, exploring the lingering effects of war as well as notions of history, identity, community, poverty, and hope.

In an exclusive interview with Filmatique, Mirlan Abdykalykov, director of Heavenly Nomadic, discusses the importance of ecology, narrative traditions in Kyrgyzstan and his next project.

Filmatique’s new streaming service introduces films that are socially, culturally, or politically relevant to audiences – often for the first time. The ultimate filmgoer’s dream online movie site.

Filmatique is available to US audiences for $4.95/month, with a 30-day free trial. There is a rotating library with 24 films: each week, a new film comes in.

In March, Filmatique emphasized its collection on cinema from banned nations, in April it is exploring post-Soviet cinema, and in May it will showcase new Asian voices.

*Below is a full line-up of post-Soviet cinema on Filmatique:

• March 30 / Heavenly Nomadic (Mirlan Abdykalykov / Kyrgyzstan, 2015)
• April 6 / True Noon (Nosir Saidov / Tajikistan, 2009)
• April 13 / Nabat (Elchin Musaoglu / Azerbaijan, 2014)
• April 20 / Adventure (Nariman Turebayev / Kazakhstan, 2014)
• April 27 / Keep Smiling (Rusudan Chkonia / Georgia, 2012)