Film Studies

Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival (MMFF) February 19-April 23, 2025

Documenting Dissent The thirty-second year of the Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival showcases a diverse and international array of new and recent documentary films. Our campuses today, like countries across the globe, are roiling in various forms of controversy. Political debates about gender identity, race/class/caste, immigration, and colonialism are increasingly mobilized to divide populations along partisan lines and fuel authoritarian movements. At the same time, misinformation and disinformation proliferate—a narrative-based pandemic, one for which no successful vaccine has yet been found. In such a climate, a crisis on so many levels, artists of every sort are rethinking their role, wondering what purpose their work might serve. In cinema, documentarians engage such issues directly, often with experimental and lyric creativity. The films and directors featured in this year’s MMFF document dissent: they tell their stories, center voices, and reclaim personal, social, and political experience in opposition to the status quo. Like W.E.B. Du Bois, we are proud to offer our diverse communities art that “tells the truth, exposes evil, and seeks, with beauty and for beauty, to set the world right".

How to Apply for the BDIC Film Studies Major, Part One of Two

How to Apply for the BDIC Film Studies Major, Part One of Two

How to Apply for the BDIC Film Studies Major, Part Two of Two

How to Apply for the BDIC Film Studies Major, Part Two of Two

(event has passed) Latinx Film Festival, October 9-13, 2023 at 6:30-9:30pm in the Integrated Learning Center

The CLACLS (Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies) team is thrilled to announce that we are hosting the first Latinx Film Festival at UMass Amherst. 

These films give visibility to a Latinx film production that is generally assimilated into minoritized views of US cinema in the United States and elsewhere. We have also invited filmmakers Monica Cohen and Samuel Kishi Leopo, as well as Ivan Monalisa, whose life story is featured in one of the films. They will be joining us to present their films and will be available for questions during the Q&A session and other events we will be announcing soon. 

This film festival is part of the Latinx Heritage Month, so we encourage everyone to attend and spread the word.

Movies in other languages than English will be subtitled, and we'll have food! 

Image credit: CLACLS

(event has passed) Theory and Practice of the Video Essay--September 22-23, 2022

Theory and Practice of the Video-Essay: an International Conference on Videographic Criticism, that will be hosted by the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on September 22 and 23, 2022.

The videographic essay is a still-emerging but swiftly evolving form.  Film scholars working in this Barthesian “third form” of critical scholarship employ the expressive power of audiovisual media for their engagements with film and film theory. This will be a two-day in-person conference addressing theory, practice, pedagogy, and future directions of this field.  It will consider submissions of videographic works, video essays, desktop films, video epigraphs, and papers. 

Poster Image credit: Daniel Pope