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 -