Choreo Dance Film Festival 2024

(NOTE : CDFF is only open for Choreomundus students and alumni. Kindly mention your cohort number when you submit the application)

The Choreomundus Dance Film Festival (CDFF) celebrates the success of students and alumni of the Erasmus Mundus programme in dance film projects, thus encouraging future generations to pursue their careers. The Festival showcases how several countries invite cultural heritages from all over the world to share non-verbal embodied diversity and inclusivity through dance.

CDFF tags onto the biannual Choreomundus Conference and Festival organised by Choreomundus Alumni Association. It travels along with the Choreomundus Alumni Conference, a nomad summit around Europe (Trondheim, Norway 2016; Szeged, Hungary 2018; Virtually 2020; Clermont-Ferrand, France 2022). CDFF is dedicated to promoting the diversity of dance cultures through film and media, bridging the gap between dance and film. Our primary aim is to use film to showcase and promote Dance as Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), gathering communities from all over the world with a special focus on humanitarian crises. Dance as ICH is a niche field in its early days of finding different audiences and formats. As film and digital media are the most effective ways of reaching the public, there is a lot of potential in combining film and dance through the lens of society and culture.

In the 2024 edition, CDFF will bring together dance artists and scholars acknowledging their legacy of community through collective memories. As a world, we are facing in different intensities the circumstances of mass migration and displacement leaving traces of forced amnesia. We find, in the inevitable relationship between forgetting and remembering, a violent separation from our sense of belonging and identity. Intergenerational perspectives, for instance, might solace the loss of memories and cultural practices.

Sometimes I forget what I know I can never forget. Sometimes we forget what we know we can never forget

How do we collectively hold onto our memories? How do we interpret and emphasize the “collective” resisting the oblivion? How do we find common ground to draw on the strengths of our collective humanism toward relational empathy? How do we create and construct collective memories through our bodies and senses? Do our bodies evoke these memories through sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing? How do traditional dances preserve the collective memories of a people? There is more forgetting than remembering in recounting memories, how can we navigate the dynamics of remembering or forgetting the past in the present, affecting the future? How is digital technology affecting the processing and reproduction of memory collectively?

Dance films become a way of making these memories tangible through the human body and for the purpose of archiving a memory for the coming nostalgia. The “remains” of embodied memory can be expressed through film, reclaiming our capacity to experience and feel suffering, rage, hardships, grief, loss, joy, happiness and empathy as humans and citizens of our times. Memory thus becomes a trigger that brings the past into the present with a constant construction of a future. We invite dance films that can take forward this sensibility and share multiple perspectives on transmitting, remembering, forgetting, and performing collective memory.