Cross_Over - intersectional digital cinema - What is it?

As a promoter of intersectional cultural education projects, we would like to bring previous analogue thematic film series such as "WELTOFFEN" or our queer film festival "Camillo Queer Cinema Week" into the digital space with "Cross_Over".

Based on the fact that in our respective cultural contexts we are also subject to a certain social normativity (e.g. heteronormativity) and the accompanying dominant culture, people and their life realities who do not correspond to this are less accepted, rejected, discriminated against or even legally persecuted and become victims of violence. Here we see it as our task to present diverse realities of life with the help of appropriate films in order to strengthen their representation and visibility, as well as to sensitise the general population to them in order to reduce prejudices and the like.

For us, the adjective intersectional describes several conditions, functionalities and structures.

On the one hand, it refers to social grievances, inequalities and patterns that are expressed in various forms of discrimination such as racism, sexism, homophobia, inter- and transphobia, classism, rejectionism, etc., both individually and structurally. We see it as our task to draw attention to these mechanisms of discrimination, group-based misanthropy and marginalised groups through the medium of film. Here the term seems deficient.

On the other hand, intersectionality is also always about the interrelationships, interlacing, intersections and simultaneity of the individual forms of discrimination, which, especially in relation to multiple discrimination, lead to independent experiences of discrimination for individual people. Likewise, intersections between the discrimination categories manifest themselves structurally in terms of their causes and mechanisms. This has an enormous influence on our social power dynamics and leads to unjust structures in which certain people are structurally more disadvantaged and discriminated against and thus do not have equal opportunities to participate and basic prerequisites in life.

If we now start to look at facts intersectionally, we not only try to recognise and expose possible similar causes, relationalities and mechanisms behind discrimination, but above all we try to always think about privileges of a culture of dominance in order to then rethink in the next step and finally work towards real equality.

Franzi Böhm