FRAMES of REPRESENTATION returns for its fifth edition from 27 November – 13 December with a programme that encapsulates notions of spectatorship – a collection of works that explore the spaces between knowledge and participation through the act of viewing. The festival continues to be a showcase for the cinema of the real, exploring in depth the aesthetic and political implications of filmmaking as both a practice and an art form.

Guided in part by the tumultuous circumstances of the past few months, we have extended the festival from nine days of screenings and related events at the ICA, originally scheduled to take place in April 2020, to a 17-day programme, only available to access via Cinema 3, our new digital platform presenting online programme for the ICA.

      

All five previous editions of the festival have explored the idea of how the cinema of the real embraces reality in its constant states of flux. And to a certain extent, what has happened this year could be perceived as an opportunity for artists to return to working together: questioning, cooperating and finding ways to reinvent the world, starting from a new imagination and from an awareness that each individual is part of a societal balance whose relationships can be never treated as definitive or taken for granted. The artist as a social worker, in other words, with a responsibility to themself and to society, yet keen to reassess and reinvent the constant flux within which life, art and film are all founding elements.

      

FRAMES of REPRESENTATION has been conceived to foster collective learning in conversation with a community of filmmakers and activists, while encouraging all of us to question traditional hierarchies and structures of seeing, listening and acting via the poetry of spectatorship. I wish you all great discoveries in the hope that they may stir new ideas – and subvert any reassuring orders and paths we may have created for ourselves.