Talent Development and Capacity Building in Small Nations: On the Twinning of Filmmakers

TY - JOUR

T1 - Talent Development and Capacity Building in Small Nations

T2 - On the Twinning of Filmmakers

AU - Hjort, Mette

N1 - Mette Hjort is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Honorary Professor of Visual Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, and Affiliate Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her most recent publication is A Companion to Nordic Cinema (Wiley-Blackwell, with Ursula Lindqvist).

PY - 2016/6/1

Y1 - 2016/6/1

N2 - In a small-nation film and media ecology, cogent thinking about capacity building is of critical importance. In the context of Danish documentary filmmaking, twinning has emerged as a promising model. Twinning engages Danish filmmakers with a world beyond Denmark, thereby counteracting certain parochialisms. At the same time, this model ties in with the Danish state’s development goals in the cultural domain, including the aim of fostering dialogue and understanding between Denmark and the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA region). This article evokes the landscape of twinning, as developed by Danish institutions, and provides a rationale for taking the phenomenon of transnationally paired practitioners seriously. More specifically, twinning is seen as a means of realizing public values through filmmaking. A specific instance of twinning involving collaboration between a Danish and a Lebanese filmmaker is discussed in detail, the aim being to identify the conditions under which the relevant type of co-authorship can be said to succeed. The emphasis in this regard is on the ways in which a partnership of equals emerges in the process of making the documentary En Araber kommer til byen (An Arab Comes to Town) (Larsen and Ghossein, 2008).

AB - In a small-nation film and media ecology, cogent thinking about capacity building is of critical importance. In the context of Danish documentary filmmaking, twinning has emerged as a promising model. Twinning engages Danish filmmakers with a world beyond Denmark, thereby counteracting certain parochialisms. At the same time, this model ties in with the Danish state’s development goals in the cultural domain, including the aim of fostering dialogue and understanding between Denmark and the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA region). This article evokes the landscape of twinning, as developed by Danish institutions, and provides a rationale for taking the phenomenon of transnationally paired practitioners seriously. More specifically, twinning is seen as a means of realizing public values through filmmaking. A specific instance of twinning involving collaboration between a Danish and a Lebanese filmmaker is discussed in detail, the aim being to identify the conditions under which the relevant type of co-authorship can be said to succeed. The emphasis in this regard is on the ways in which a partnership of equals emerges in the process of making the documentary En Araber kommer til byen (An Arab Comes to Town) (Larsen and Ghossein, 2008).

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - public values

KW - twinning

KW - capacity building

KW - multiculturalism

KW - partnerships of equals

KW - co-authorship

U2 - 10.1386/jsca.6.2.81_1

DO - 10.1386/jsca.6.2.81_1

M3 - Journal article

SN - 2042-7891

VL - 6

SP - 81

EP - 100

JO - Journal of Scandinavian Cinema

JF - Journal of Scandinavian Cinema

IS - 2

ER -