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A diversity of places compounds our current urban realities. These include nourishing places as well as unsettling, even frightening, places. Some places are inclusive civic spaces open to all; others are private, exclusive and controlled places. Places for children and places for adults; sacred places where we go for spiritual uplifting; restaurants and other places where we go to eat; places for women, and places where women may not feel too welcomed or simply "out of place" are also sites inscribed by social diversity.
Observing all such places raises the question of what creates the appropriateness of the use and social inscriptions of a place. More specifically, who has the right to (re-)make and use such places and why? When does a place create/transmit sense of safety, or its opposite? For example, consider the idea of home, which usually evoke a sense of care, familiarity, and safety. Yet, it may also become a place of terror, as the too many incidents of domestic violence may suggest. In other words, place is embedded with a multiplicity of experiences, meanings and emotions. These may be experienced individually or shared among a group of people, who may vindicate ownership and use it in spatializing their identity.
Hence, given this mushrooming diversity of places, the main objective of this project and related film festival is to promote awareness and a critical outlook on how we, all of us, experience place so as to have a better understanding of how it works, affects people's lives and people intervene in its making.
This year film festival calls for entries on the DIVERSITY OF PLACES that compounds our urban realities.
Questions, themes, topics and issues to be addressed in the digital film can include, but are not limited to:
what makes a place a place? where to locate place-ness?
versions of place: what makes a place sacred or secular, precious or worthless, safe or insecure,open or closed, inclusive or exclusive, ...?
How are these emotions transmitted and experienced? How are the rules of appropriate behavior in these places enforced or transgressed?
Who makes places and for whom? who has the right to (re-)make and use such places and why?
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