My PhD Dissertation

My PhD dissertation takes a close look at the complex, sprawling cultural institution known as Hot Docs – the world’s second largest international documentary film festival (after IDFA in Amsterdam). I’m interested in the ways in which Hot Docs space is managed for complimentary and competing impulses associated with the commercial side of the documentary industry, the arts and culture side, and crucially, the social movement/political activist side. The “official” write-up is below, but this will undoubtedly change as I burrow deeper down the rabbit hole. The very hopefully (and some would say wishful-thinking) completion date for this dissertation is March 2012. Fingers crossed.

GLOBAL DOCUMENTARY CONTACT ZONES:
HOT DOCS AND THE NETWORKED DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL

PhD Dissertation Proposal – Ezra Winton
Supervisor: Ira Wagman

My PhD dissertation will analyze the Hot Docs documentary film festival as an institution and as a nodal point in a global network of communication, culture, commerce, politics, technology and people. Emphasizing the concepts of cultures of circulation, interpretive communities and documentary culture and discourse, the thesis will view Hot Docs as a cultural institution and will explore the ways documentary film festivals imbue unique qualities as cultural events that differentiate the social space and the discourse from other film festivals, based on the documentary genre’s dynamic relationship with representing reality, social justice, public service, education, civic engagement and truth regimes. The thesis will argue that the recently established documentary festival phenomenon as an event, a space, a social imaginary, a place, and a ‘contact zone’ is: a) an emergent cultural institution with its own specific apparatuses, technologies and subjectivities; b) a documentary heterotopia; c) a network node for cultures of circulation; and d) a discursive and physical place for the forging of interpretive communities that embody and communicate oppositional social, cultural and economic aspects of documentary culture and the mainstream commercial festival.

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