SHARRON HEFNER: OPEN SOURCE FILMMAKING: SOLARPUNK PRINCIPLES FOR INDEPENDENT PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION

Blade Runner 2049

WEDNESDAY 22 JULY, 14:00 - 14:25 

Johnson Auditorium

This presentation develops a solarpunk framework for independent filmmaking practice and distribution, arguing that the principles animating the solarpunk cultural movement offer cinema a coherent and urgently needed alternative to both commercial and prestige indie models. Drawing on Ursula Franklin's Real World of Technology, Murray Bookchin's social ecology, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's land as pedagogy, and Tim Ingold's philosophy of making, the presentation moves through the following organizing principles: aesthetic vocabulary, ethics of practice, sustainability and ecology, culture of repair and reuse, techno-optimism, and radical inclusivity.

Where dominant independent film culture remains organized around individual authorship, festival gatekeeping, and platform distribution, a solarpunk practice is decentralized, collectively structured, locally embedded, and committed to the community screening and open distribution models that follow logically from its political commitments.

The presentation concludes by proposing solarpunk filmmaking as a form of what Levitas calls utopia as method: a practice of enacting, in the conditions of production itself, the more livable world the work imagines on screen.