In 2005, the Belfast Film Festival curated a series of screenings and commissioned a publication on racism in Belfast.
This was in response to multiple media outlets describing the city as ‘the most racist’ in the world, and was an attempt to understand how cinema and the moving image can be intertwined with race and racism. 20 years have passed and the world is almost unrecognisable.
The advent of social media and the blurred lines of news and fake news has created an environment in which racist pogroms can be incited through AI-generated posts. When the moving image is being manipulated to manipulate others, how can cinema be used to combat this hatred? This panel discussion brings together activists, community workers and film scholars to discuss the question posed and how cinema might fill a vacuum, on a community level, where our own political system has failed.