Author: cinemasocialjustice
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Film Society and Black History Month: A Screening of Sinners (2025).
Ren Anthony To celebrate Black History Month, York St. John’s Film Society, in collaboration with the Cinema and Social Justice Project, hosted a screening of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025). The film itself represents an important movement across contemporary media, where there is a duly recognised space, as well, for films which challenge a predominantly white-oriented cultural perspective. …
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Dreams of integration and legacies of colonialism in French sports films
Jonathan Ervine The way in which contemporary French sports films depict social justice issues is evolving. Not as many are based on the exploits of stereotypically macho males; an increasing amount show men who embrace vulnerability on and off the sports field and assume greater family responsibilities. However, the makers of these films appear reluctant…
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The Inside Film Project: Working-Class Knowledge, Prison, and Radical Film Pedagogy
Deirdre O’Neill The Inside Film Project runs both inside prisons and on ‘the out’ working with serving and former prisoners. It recognises the majority of serving prisoners in the UK come from the most marginalized and impoverished sections of the working class. The project begins from an acknowledgment that working-class knowledge has long been denigrated or ignored…
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International Women’s week screening
Lenina Vanzyl International Women’s Week is a commemoration that has been honoured since the early 70s and is one that has celebrated and acknowledged the achievements of women globally whilst advocating for and towards gender equality. Alongside raising awareness of women’s rights and the challenges faced in today’s society, it remembers the journey taken in…
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Drone as Death Star: The Creator and the Task of Critique
Alex Adams The central conceptual territory of Gareth Edwards’ 2023 movie The Creator is a sci fi genre staple: humanity is locked in a bitter civilisational war with its uncannily humanoid machine creations. Despite the capacious potential for cliché that this may suggest, however, the movie’s novel emphasis on the realignment of its protagonist’s allegiances has unexpectedly…
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You Wouldn’t Be Here If I Didn’t Pay You: Child Labor and Precarity in Honey Boy (2019)
Enes Akdağ Disclaimer! : This blog post is derived from the conference presentation entitled “You Wouldn’t Be Here If I Didn’t Pay You: Intersectional Look to Employee/Employer Child Actor in Honey Boy (2019)”, at The Many Faces and Spaces of Precarity in the Moving Image Online Conference. From Jackie Coogan to Shia LaBeouf, the labor conditions of child…
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The Social Pressures of Accepting Mixed-Race Identity: Analyzing Biracial Representation in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
Claire Henry Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), (SMASV), is an artistically stunning sequel to 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse, which follows biracial teenager Miles Morales as he navigates both the multiverse and his identity. Miles, an African-American and Puerto Rican young man from Brooklyn, embarks on adventures while dealing with the pressures of his mixed identity.…
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Degrees of progress: working our way up the ladder
Tara Judah “To stay at the forefront of screen culture, we’ll embrace change and evolve as a resilient, sustainable, digital-first and diverse organisation with a plurality of voices.”[i] – Ben Roberts, BFI Screen Culture/2033 An inherent fluctuation in public spend means UK National Lottery funding is not a constant, fixed amount. As such, the British Film Institute…
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Jalsa (2022) Hindi Cinema and Social Justice
Rekha Datta Of all the challenges of today, ‘social justice’ remains as complicated and as elusive as ever. The film Jalsa (Triveni, 2022) explores the complexities of social justice admirably with a balanced plot and narrative. The film presents the lives of two working women– Maya Menon and Ruksana. Maya is a high-profile, powerful, socially…
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A Son of the Devil (1924) and Son of Ingagi (1940): Negotiating ‘otherness’ in Early Black Horror
Mark Fryers In recent years, the history of Black horror cinema has been recovered and rewritten. This post will contextualise two pioneering Black horror films in the lesser-known history of Hollywood cinema, highlighting the relationship between the mainstream and the margins in early Hollywood. Oscar Micheaux is acknowledged as a pioneer of Black filmmaking. A…
Cinema and Social Justice PROJECT 