Keynote Speakers
Prof Mette HJORT
Chair Professor of Film and Media Studies
The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Biography
Mette Hjort is an Adjunct Research Chair Professor of Film and Media at The Education University of Hong, where she serves as the founding Co-director of the Research Centre for Creative Arts and Public Value. Mette is an Honorary Professor at UCL, UK, at the University of Lincoln, UK, and at Hong Kong Baptist University, and an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. A film scholar with expertise in cinema as a source of public value, including health and well-being, Mette has served on the Board of the Danish Film Institute (appointed by the Danish Ministry of Culture) and as President of the Jury for the Zanzibar International Film Festival.
Keynote Title
“Beyond Entertainment Value: Film as a Source of Wellbeing and Human Flourishing”
The cinema and related moving images are widely associated with one type of value: entertainment value. Typically the result of commercial pursuits in industrial contexts, motion pictures are seen as delivering nice-to-have but ultimately fleeting benefits, and as having little to do with creating the conditions for human flourishing. My aim is to evoke the missed opportunities that result from the reduction of motion pictures to entertainment value, narrowly construed. Focusing on the issue of harm, I evoke the significant costs that have often been incurred during the process of producing entertainment value, and present some of the measures that are being taken to mitigate various harms. In a second moment, I provide examples of motion pictures as a non-trivial source of public value, of different types of value extending beyond mere entertainment, each of them directly linked to human flourishing. Finally, I raise the question of where we should look for fit-for-purpose understandings of the non-trivial value of motion pictures. Evoking filmmaking practices in Burkina Faso, Tanzania, and Palestine, I make the case for significantly expanding the conversation about film’s possible contributions, for dialogue on a North/South and properly global basis. The called for exchanges, I argue, must have implications for how we educate film professionals, but also policy makers and audiences. Informing my talk are initiatives associated with one of The Education University of Hong Kong’s university-level research centres, the Research Centre for Creative Arts
