WebinarThursday 18 March 2021
12:00pm – 1:00pm
Queer Cinema: the Global Context and Japan
This event will start at 12pm GMT
Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation
Fully bookedQueer cinema has evolved significantly over the past few decades, becoming a new mainstream cinema option, and raising awareness of the experiences of the LGBTQ+ community worldwide. There has been a remarkable increase in the number of queer films produced recently by activists and other related communities. Queer film festivals nowadays play an important role not only in screening non-commercial films but also in supporting the LGBTQ+ community.
In this webinar, Professor Karl Schoonover discussed how queer cinema has evolved globally, along with its current status and challenges. Dr Yuka Kanno then explored the relationship between activist films and queer communities in Japan including the key role of queer festivals in Tokyo, Osaka, and regional cities.
A short summary of the event can be accessed via the link below, located on the Foundation’s Facebook page:
Event summaryA video of the event can be found here:
About the contributors
Professor Karl Schoonover
Professor Karl Schoonover is Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. His research explores the relationship of cinema aesthetics to political change, as well as the history of film theory, particularly its engagement with questions of realism, temporality, excess, obscenity, and the photographic image. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (formerly Cinema Journal) and Film Criticism, and is an advisory board member for Routledge’s Remapping World Cinema book series. His publications include the award-winning Queer Cinema in the World (2016) and the anthology Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (2010), both co-written with Dr Rosalind Galt, and Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema (2012).
Dr Yuka Kanno
Dr Yuka Kanno is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Global Studies and the Director of the Center for Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Doshisha University. Her research interests include queer and feminist film theory and criticism, gender and sexuality studies, and Japanese visual culture. Her current projects focus on queer film festivals and transnational queer girls’ cinema and culture. She is the author of numerous publications on queer and film theory, including “Queer Resonance: The Stardom of Miwa Akihiro” in The Japanese Cinema Book (2020), edited by Hideaki Fujiki and Alastair Philips, and the forthcoming book (in Japanese), Queer Cinema Studies (Koyoshobo, 2021). She also organizes Queer Visions, a queer experimental film screening in Kyoto, Japan.