[Filmfestivalresearch] Reply: New research group from Italy

[Roy Menarini]

Dear friends and colleagues, 

I am writing to you as a member of the network who has recently registered (not more than a year ago), but who is truly willing and interested in Film Festival Studies. Thanks to invaluable suggestions from Dina Iordanova, Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck, together with a few Italian colleagues, we are trying to get the apparently less interested Italian academic panorama to be more involved in the research and discourses on Film Festival Studies. Some, like Enrico Vannucci, have been actively working in this field since long and many of you already know them. Others are just starting to work on this now. However, the number of interested individuals who were unable to communicate between each other has been revealed to be sufficiently ample so as to allow 
the birth of a group that for the sake of convenience could be called the ‘Italian Film Festival Research Network’.

We have a few milestones ahead of us, which are:

1)	The presence of a panel at the NECS conference in Milan 2014: L01, Saturday 21st, 15.45, Geopolitical Strategies in Film Festival Between Cinephilia and Activism, with myself (as a respondent), and panelists Monia Acciari, Ludovica Fales and Giacomo di Foggia.
2)	A special issue on Film Festivals to be co-edited by Monia Acciari and myself for the peer-reviewed journal www.cinergie.it to be released in October 2014. 
3)	Our presence as delegates and speakers at the conference “Film Festival Cartographies” Symposium, at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, on the 20th and 21st of November 2014, Modena, Italy, organised by Enrico Vannucci and María-Paz Peirano.
4)	The possibility of publishing the proceedings of the conference through the publishing house Mimesis International.

The current composition of the Italian Film Festival Research Network:

Roy Menarini (Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna), Coordinator, mail: roy.menarini at fastwebnet.it

Monia Acciari (University of Oxford), mail: monia.acciari at gmail.com

Andrea Bellavita (Università degli Studi dell’Insubria Varese), mail: andrea.bellavita at uninsubria.it
  
Marco Cucco (Università della Svizzera Italiana), mail: marco.cucco at usi.ch

Giacomo Di Foggia (Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna), mail: giacomo.difoggia3 at unibo.it

Ludovica Fales (Università degli Studi di Udine), mail: ludovica.fales at gmail.com

Mariagrazia Fanchi (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Milano), mail: mariagrazia.fanchi at unicatt.it

Giulia Grassilli (Human Rights Festival, director) mail: giuliagrassilli at gmail.com 

Elena Pollacchi (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia), mail: elena.pollacchi at orient.su.se

Daniela Persico e Alessandro Stellino (www.filmidee.it), mail: alessandro.stellino at gmail.com, danielinapersico at gmail.com 

Stefano Pisu (Università di Cagliari), mail: stefanopisu at yandex.ru 

Enrico Vannucci (Oxford Brookes University/Ozu Film Festival), mail: enrico.vannucci-2011 at brookes.ac.uk

Before seeing each other in Milan, I wanted to formalize our presence to the members of this mailing list, thanking everyone for your invaluable work with a hope to have the opportunity to collaborate in the near future. Obviously, given the number of Italian researchers around the world, we are ready to welcome those of you who are interested.

Kind regards,
Roy Menarini