Project Description
The Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema is a twelve-day celebration of artistic excellence and diversity in contemporary independent media arts. In 1996, the PFWC screened over one hundred films from thirty-seven countries for an audience of 22,000 people. The festival provides an environment that encourages interaction among filmmakers and audiences as one way to fulfill the International House mission of cultural exchange and understanding. The festival's programming includes significant attention to films that address contemporary social, political, and cultural issues. Documentaries have lent themselves most readily to the various dialogue formats used by the festival and have been the most popular with audiences. The festival seeks documentaries and features that acknowledge the artist's point of view and whose subject and storytelling capture the emotion of the issue in ways as compelling as a dramatic film.

Civic Engagement/Dialogue Activities
The Festival's Cine Cafes offer topical, facilitated discussions focused around a particular grouping of festival films that explore common themes. They are casual gatherings at local bookstores, cafes, and coffee shops that "are not about raising hands, experts, or right answers." For selected films, filmmakers and/or other individuals with relevant perspective also facilitate post screening discussions. For all discussion forums, the festival seeks skilled facilitators who share the festival's dual agenda to explore the art of filmmaking and to bring out the issues.

The festival sees certain limitations on its role in relation to public dialogue. Creating substantive opportunities for dialogue within the festival requires programmatic attention, just as the selection and screening of films does. The festival provides the forum and the space and gets the parties there, but sees follow-up as beyond its means. Appropriate community-based partners would be needed to extend the dialogue or develop action.

Project Summary

Information Sources
Program and promotional materials from the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema; interview, Linda Blackaby, festival director.