Cinema dal Basso presents: Open call for submission of video art works for “String” Refugee Festival Scotland (June 14-26 2016)

Everything we do, even the slightest thing we do, can have a ripple effect and repercussion that emanate. If you throw a pebble into the water on one side of the ocean, it can create a tidal wave on the other side…” Victor Webster

Refugee Festival Scotland is an annual Scotland-wide programme of arts, cultural, educational, heritage and sports events that brings together people from refugee and local communities. Coordinated by Scottish Refugee Council, that this year celebrates his 30^th anniversary, the Festival plays a crucial role in raising awareness of refugee experiences and helping people rebuild their lives in Scotland, through the sharing of cultural events and artistic works related to the celebration of the contributions refugees make to life in Scotland and the welcome offered by local people.

Last year’s programme around 9,000 people attended, organized and participated in Refugee Festival Scotland, which consisted of 110 events taking place in 10 local authority areas across the country. With your help, we want to make an even bigger impact in 2016! The theme for this year’s festival edition is solidarity. Due to the embittering of the migrant crisis in Europe, now more than ever we need to stand together with people who’ve had to flee their homes and are now trying to build new lives here. So we especially welcome works that encourage the power of collective voice and invite artists to use the festival platform to share their different points of view on the argument and help strengthen solidarity and a positive and genuine approach and motivate the public of the festival to take collective initiatives.

Partners of the Festival are the social enterprise The Image Collective, the multi-arts festival Syn, one of the most notable artistic events in Edinburgh, the media activism collective Fotomovimento and, above all, the voluntary organization ArtRipples, organizing committee of the exhibition “Strings”, which will take place at the Ocean Terminal of Edinburgh all along the festival. ArtRipples is a community group based in the Scottish capital which aim is to analyse social and cultural issues through art exhibitions and projects, in order to generate awareness, a genuine human approach to the topic and a sense of possibility and solidarity within the community. As ArtRipples believes art is fundamental for the development of our society and of new ways of thinking, it gives support to emerging artists, generates international collaborations, promotes workshops and initiatives and develops projects to create art with a social purpose and that could generate positive and constructive actions, as for example promoting integration and community development.

With this aim, the group organized, as part of the Refugee Festival Scotland, the multi-arts exhibition “Strings”, that celebrates with music, art, film, performance and other events the richness and vibrancy of Scotland’s communities.

Cinema dal Basso, organizing committee of Caserta Independent Film Festival and of other cinematographic events dedicated to cinema lovers and to all the independent artists who faces, covering different roles, the seventh art and the cornerstone of an underground movement which, starting from the bottom, aspires to create unlikely and profitable meetings and connections based on the common love for a different, independent and passionate cinema, joins the festival as a partner and opens a call for the selection of multi-language video works concerning refugees, migrants and asylum seekers. The present call for artists is open to short films, feature-films, documentaries, animations, video clips and video installations. The attendance is free and no prize will be provided for the participants: the works, each one accurately selected by some cinema experts and all of them showing a very high technical and narrative worth, will be awarded according to the high visibility and diffusion as possible; above all that, they will be shown during the festival, indeed, they’ll be part of an artistic “container” to glean to and into which different realities, involved in many ways in the cinematographic circuit, can flow into. Cinema dal Basso, in fact, shrink from the common place of the economic speculation of the work of art, proposing instead to free the artist and his work from the commercial mentality, inviting him to join to a circuit, where the work of art encourages viewers’ breathing space, being appreciated by audience, film-makers and lovers of the seventh art, pushed by a sincere and genuine passion for cinema, according to its exclusive artistic value.