Like Ships That Pass in the Night
The Social Life of Film #2

Ostende | 12-15 September 2024 | Collective Reading Session

The Camelia Committe took part in the second edition of The Social Life of Film and presented Like Ships That Pass in the Night, a collective reading session centered around the theme of collectivity. Each participant was invited to bring (and read) an excerpt of something they have recently read that has informed and inspired their collective work. The excerpts were prose, poetry or academic writing, ranging from a paragraph to a page long, and in multiple languages.

The first edition of The Social Life of Film was organised in 2023 in Copenhagen by PRISMS and Terrassen. In 2024, Monokino brought the meeting to Ostend. Over the past ten years, there has been an explosion of small, autonomous, non-profit, nomadic screening platforms that regularly organise film events without having their own location. The Social Life of Film #2 brings together 25 of these nomadic platforms in Ostend.

What binds these organisations is their event-driven nature, often a specific and personal focus from which their programs originate, a strong commitment, but also a tendency to operate with limited resources, which creates fragility and sometimes leads to a short lifespan. The aim of the gathering is to create a network of shared knowledge and experience, and to initiate a broader conversation about the necessity of a more inclusive film culture.

In addition to getting acquainted with each other, we are also happy to introduce some of these exciting platforms to a broader audience. We asked a few of them to create a program based on the principles of Shhh—silent film and the sea — but also to showcase the uniqueness of their platform. For this special edition we will show films on the beach, with some screenings accompanied by musicians or storytellers. Shhh is anything but ‘silent.’

The Social Life of Film brings together 25 collectives: anorak (Berlin), Beforeforgetting (Copenhagen), Birdie Num Num (Barcelona), blue screen (Brussels), Cinema Fulgor (Odemira), Cinema Galleggiante (Venice), Cinéma Parenthèse (Brussel), HÆRK (Oslo), Kinoautomat (Ghent), LaborBerlin (Berlin), Liberated Film Club (London), Lumière (Barcelona), Mascara Film Club (London), Monokino (Oostende), Nomadica (Bologna), Non-Aligned Film Archives (Paris/Rennes), Other Cinemas (London), Polar Film Lab (Tromsø), PRISMS (Oslo), Sharna Pax (Copenhagen/London), Sinema Transtopia (Berlin), Terrassen (Copenhagen), The Camelia Committee (Beirut/Oslo), Walden (Stockholm), WET (Rotterdam).