The global pandemic crisis triggered by COVID-19, on the threshold of 2020, also had a tremendous impact on creative industries. While claiming an urgent recovery plan for the whole sector, we stand for a widening and broader diversity in the gamut of interested parties. In this way, it would be possible to respond to a global demand for participation, coming from groups that are scarcely present in senior positions and are associated with a strongly limited narrative. XXVI International Conference of Film Studies Migrations, Citizenships, Inclusivity aims to meet this demand and return it in terms of analysis and operating proposals.

The double scope of this conference, as an ideal closure of the interdisciplinary project Imaginaries of Global Migration: Identity, Citizenship, Interculturality (Call for Ideas 2019-21), is to explore the order of narratives in film and media on migrations, citizenship and transculturality, and the space of viability for talents with a migrant background in Italian creative industries.

We experience a relative stagnation in film and media narratives on migrations, citizenship and transculturality, associated mostly with uplifting stories of first arrival and reception. This stagnation appears conditioned by a political elite strongly polarized on these issues, as well as by a news system that is oriented to be a sounding board for the discontent of the social media audience rather than a body that gives tools for reading the present. In addition, the context of UE-based and local migration politics justify and support proactively securitarian and sovereignist logics that have transformed the Mediterranean Sea and the Balkans into liquid frontiers marked by death, by institutional violence, and by a denial of the most basic human rights such as the freedom of movement.

In response to this rather daunting scenario, here and there we can see timid signs of liveliness and openness toward claiming more inclusive narratives, and a niche for stories more in tune with the real country, especially in cinéma du réel production, in TV series and formats for the web. Still, new claims, emerging from the network of antiracist associations and from several subjects inspired by the movement Black Lives Matter, against the regular use in RAI shows of bad practices such as blackface and of verbal expressions betraying the persistence of a subculture drenched in racism, sexism, homo-lesbo-transphobia and ableism, deserve to be relaunched and most of all to be answered.

On the other hand, from BFI to Oscars, there has been a hive of initiatives testifying about the emergence of a new growing global awareness related to issues of privilege and inequality in creative industries. It’s time for decision makers in Italian cultural politics, in public broadcasting service, and in creative industries to cope with these differences in terms of opportunity and this gap in the access to performing arts occupations, rather than condoning a stagnant state of things that is likely to be worsened by the persistent closure of movie theatres.