Mare Nostrum

1-2 April 2025, IFF Panamá

As recent years have seen thousands of migrants carve new routes from the Caribbean via Central America, neoliberal free trade agreements such as CAFTA-DR link the economic fate of the area, and climate change-intensified natural disasters such as hurricanes batter island and isthmus nations alike, a new and dramatic light has been shed on the connections between these two neighboring and overlapping regions. The connections traced by these recent movements invite us to think again and with new urgency about the ‘Gran Caribe’ – that greater region both separated and connected by the Caribbean Sea and its growing body of film. ‘Mare Nostrum’ refers to that shared and shifting space, whilst also highlighting the perspectives of those speaking from and across it, via film. 

The last two decades have seen a rising tide of Central American and Caribbean film as new legal frameworks, financing mechanisms, and distribution opportunities have led to both increased production and heightened international visibility. The institutional infrastructures and human networks behind this wave – seen, for example, in the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Television in Cuba’s San Antonio de los Baños, or Costa Rica’s Mercado Audio Visual Centro América & Caribe – point to an underexplored, slippery, and fluid space shared by these two overlapping regions’ cinemas. Testifying to and facilitating the exploration of this ‘Mare Nostrum’ is the Panama International Film Festival, whose support for Central American and Caribbean cinemas make it the ideal host of this two-day event. 

The symposium seeks to explore the commonalities, connections, and differences in and between Central American and Caribbean cinemas, whilst also foregrounding how they respond to and reimagine shared social, environmental, economic, and political challenges. It welcomes a variety of approaches and focuses, from close film analysis to studies of particular directors, film history to reception studies, and accounts of regional mechanisms to analyses of transnational patterns, amongst others. We invite proposals from filmmakers and scholars working on and in Central American and/or Caribbean film on themes such as:

• Professional mobilities, institutional and individual collaborations, coproductions, festival circuits
• The role of the State and the third sector in the regions’ cinemas 
• Local, regional, and transnational mechanisms, funding opportunities, and obstacles for film production
• Documentation of the history of film in Central America and/or the Caribbean
• Colonial legacies and actualities on film and in film industries
• Race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and linguistic minorities in/on film
• (Post)conflict and memory in film
• Representations of migration and im/mobility
• Cinematic responses to environmental injustice and disaster
• Ecological impacts and sustainable solutions for filmmaking in the two regions

Participants will receive festival passes allowing them to attend industry events and film screenings at IFF Panamá (3-6 April). Please submit abstracts of 250 words in English or Spanish by 15 December 2024 to all the conference convenors: Maria Lourdes Cortés (University of Costa Rica, maria.cortespacheco@ucr.ac.cr), Mauricio Espinoza (University of Cincinnati, espinojm@ucmail.uc.edu), Mary Leonard (University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez and University of Cincinnati, mary.leonard@upr.edu) and Dunja Fehimović (Newcastle University, dunja.fehimovic@newcastle.ac.uk).