Film Geographies is an international platform, archive, and curatorial network exploring the relationship between film and place.
Founded by Jessica Jacobs in 2016, in collaboration with Joseph Palis, it brings together over 1,500 researchers, filmmakers, and practitioners, and has curated a growing collection of more than 300 films. Through screenings, collaborations, and sustained engagement with major geography conferences, Film Geographies has established itself as a key site for the development of film–geography as a field of practice and inquiry.
The platform operates across academic and cultural contexts, supporting new forms of research, curation, and public engagement. It enables connections between filmmakers and geographers, foregrounds place-based storytelling, and creates spaces where film functions as both method and medium.
Film Geographies is now entering its next phase, expanding its international curatorial network and developing the archive as a shared resource. It welcomes collaborations with institutions, organisations, and individuals interested in hosting screenings, contributing work, or building new strands of activity.
What makes a film geographical?
What makes a film geographical? For us a geographical film is a film that explores people’s relationship to their environment, a film that is place-based, and where that ‘place’, often dismissed as ‘background’ in other films, is treated like a character in its own right with agency and voice. (Jacobs and Palis, 2020).
Why make a geographical film?
As a creative research method, filmmaking in an academic context can produce new forms of knowledge, and help us understand how knowledge is produced. Ongoing crises in the climate, health and the political system has shown that we need to understand how power shapes our lives and the rise of the decolonise movement has once more turned our attention to the way we produce knowledge. Films can be essayistic in structure, but they are not the same as texts. Films can relay arguments but also reflections and emotions. Part of the pleasure of making films is allowing people to watch them and reinterpret them according to their lived reality. Films can also address enduring issues of diversity and inclusivity in western academic institutions.
Jessica Jacobs PhD, FHEA
My interest in film is based on it being a different kind of knowledge creation and production process to text-based methods. Using filmmaking in an academic context gives us the potential to produce a different way of knowing and understanding our world. It’s exciting to think through the way that film creates different fields of representation. The film is one thing, but of course the methodology of filmmaking is no less important and we particularly encourage submissions that reflect on the mode of production. Aside from film I’m also very interested in how filmmaking intersects with other crafting knowledge and practices. My research focuses on tangible heritage and intangible heritage. I am particularly interested in how heritage is visualized, remembered and enacted through the production of tourist space. Filmmaking, crafting, creative mapping and other community-led strategies are more than their sum and go beyond their ability to engage a wider audience within the scope of academic research and knowledge production.