Living with diversity: what difference can film-making make?

Abstract

When it comes to meeting the multicultural challenge that currently confronts some of the smaller European nations, film-making has an important role to play. For a variety of reasons, documentary film-making has a particularly significant contribution to make. With its capacity to bring the concrete other into clear focus and its emphasis on basic epistemological norms, a properly assertoric approach to film-making helps to counteract stereotyped thinking while encouraging depth of understanding. In contexts characterized by thoughtful cultural policy, by visionary programming efforts, and by a clear sense of the opportunities that new platforms for debate and exchange afford, documentary film-making emerges as a particularly powerful means of both forging and strengthening the social bonds on which civil society be it local, regional, or global depends.