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Dear friends and colleagues, /Film Festivals and Imagined Communities/, the second volume of /Film Festival Yearbook/ series is published. Please visit our website http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/filmbooks to order your copy. If you would like to review the book for a journal, please contact Ruby Cheung at [log in to unmask] Hope it is of interest to you! ------------ */Film Festival Yearbook 2: Film Festivals and Imagined Communities/* Edited by Dina Iordanova with Ruby Cheung St Andrews Film Studies, 2010 ISBN: 978-0-9563730-1-4 (paperback) Price: £17.99 (UK), $29.00 (US) http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/filmbooks Film Festivals are usually associated with big cities’ most glamorous sites where celebrities showcase designer-branded outfits on miles of red carpet, all lit up by press flashlights. But how about the other film festivals, those organised by minority groups for minority audiences? How about the festivals that do not trade in glamour but focus on a variety of political and social agendas instead? There are the UK’s largest African film festival held annually in Edinburgh, the Migrant Worker Film Festival in South Korea, or the festivals set up by ethnic minority or human rights activists to cater to displaced populations in the Sahara or promote stateless Kurdish culture in the diaspora, as well as grand showcases staged by wealthy industrialised nations in extension of their cultural diplomacy efforts. These film festivals may be far from the limelight, yet in creating live encounters they bring together a host of imagined communities and are of at least equal importance in regard to our understanding of the dynamics in the global circulation of cinema. */Film Festivals and Imagined Communities/* (2010), the second volume of the */Film Festival Yearbook/* from St Andrews Film Studies, comes timely to shed light on these issues. This latest volume brings together essays about festivals that use international cinema to facilitate transnationally ‘imagined communities’ for diverse socio-cultural-ethnic interactions in a vast range of places, from Vienna, San Francisco, and Havana to Seoul, Bradford, and Dakhla. The ‘Contexts’ section includes texts highlighting aspects of festival organisation, cultural policies, and funding models, as well as analysing programming practices related to these often highly politicised events. The diverse range of contributors and contributions to the volume reflect the series’ transnational focus. Authors include Ruby Cheung, Lindiwe Dovey, Michael Guillén, Yun Mi Hwang, Dina Iordanova, Miriam Ross, Isabel Santaolalla and Stefan Simanowitz, Mustafa Gündog(du, Jérôme Segal, and Roy Stafford. The book features the 2009 update of the film festival research bibliography by Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck, and an extensive thematically-organised listing of a variety of transnational festivals. ‘The very ambitious aspiration of the/ Film Festival Yearbook/ is, quite literally, to define a new area of film study.’ – Jonathan Rosenbaum (www.jonathanrosenbaum.com) ‘/Film Festivals and Imagined Communities/ – the second volume in the series – opens up new horizons both for those who study media and those who create the significant but often overlooked “media worlds” where films first get launched: film festivals from the “periphery”.’ – Faye Ginsburg (Director, Center for Media, Culture and History, New York University) Review copies of */Film Festival Yearbook 2: Film Festivals and Imagined Communities/* will be sent to various internationally renowned journals with global circulation, including /Cineaste/,/ Screen/,/ Film Comment/,/ Film Quarterly/, /Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television/,/ Journal of Popular Film and TV/, /Film Criticism/,/ Canadian Journal of Film Studies/,/ Senses of Cinema/,/ Positif/, and more. * About the editors:* Dina Iordanova has built an academic career as a specialist on the cinema of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Her more recent work is focused on business models and distribution patterns within the international film industries. She is Director of the Centre for Film Studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where she leads The Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘Dynamics of World Cinema’ (www.st-andrews.ac.uk/worldcinema). She is also the publisher of the /Film Festival Yearbook/ (FFY) series and writes DinaView.com. Her most recent work appears in /Cinema at the Periphery/ (2010) and /Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe/ (2010). Ruby Cheung is The Leverhulme Trust Research Associate at the Centre for Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, where she works with the ‘Dynamics of World Cinema’ team. Her research interests include East Asian cinemas, Asian film industries, diasporic film distribution, regional and national film policy, Chinese diasporic on-line fandom and issues of film promotion. She is the editor of /Cinemas, Identities and Beyond/ (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). Her latest work includes investigations into diasporic on-line fandom of epic cinema as well as an anthology on Asian film festivals.