Conference dates: December 4–5, 2026

Abstract/Panel submission deadline: August 15, 2026

Decision on submission: September 7, 2026

Venue: National Film School KIMO, Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre (LMTA)

Mode of participation: In person only

Conference language: English

Organizers: Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, Institute of International Relations and Political Science of Vilnius University, Media Education and Research Centre “Meno avilys”, Lithuanian Culture Research Institute

Partners: AVAKA, Vilnius Municipality, Lithuanian Council of Culture, Film Archive of the National Archives of Estonia, Latvian Academy of Culture

Conference Paper Submission Form: https://forms.gle/evCHNdTNCTjkdcbg7

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Off the Radar: Moving Images, Exhibition and Distribution Practices

Film Cultures in the Baltic Sea Region and Visegrád Countries from Early Cinema to the 21st Century

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The conference Off the Radar: Moving Images, Exhibition and Distribution Practices invites scholars, archivists, artists, curators, and researchers to explore overlooked, marginal, unstable, and hybrid audiovisual cultures. The conference, which has usually focused on the Baltic Sea region, is for the first time collaborating with the Visegrád countries and invites researchers to explore cinematic processes throughout the long twentieth century and into the present. Bringing together perspectives from cinema and media studies, media archaeology, visual culture, cultural history, archival studies, anthropology, and related disciplines, the conference seeks to rethink the history of cinema beyond canonical narratives, national frameworks, and established institutional histories.

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The Baltic Sea Region and Visegrád Countries have long been a space of intense political, cultural, and technological transformations shaped by imperial formations, wars, occupations, socialism, colonial entanglements, welfare-state modernities, and neoliberal transitions. Its film and media cultures developed across multiple borders and asymmetries: between East and West, center and periphery, official and unofficial production, cinema and non-cinema, visibility and disappearance. The conference proposes to examine audiovisual practices that have often remained “off the radar” in film studies: educational and training films, newsreels, amateur, scientific and industrial films, expanded and mixed audiovisual forms, exhibition and distribution practices, lost or fragmented film histories, feminist and queer cinema narratives, transmedial cultural processes. 

 

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Training, educational, and ethnographic films

• Newsreels and non-fiction films

• Amateur filmmaking and vernacular media

• Film exhibition, viewing and distribution: (non-)conventional practices 

• Postcolonial and decolonial readings of imperial, Soviet and socialist film cultures

• Cultural policy, censorship, and institutional infrastructures

• Lost films, fragmented archives, and methods of reconstructing absent media histories

• Feminist and queer cinema 

• Regional modernities and media histories

• Mixed and experimental audiovisual practices in the late socialist and post-socialist periods

• AI, restoration technologies, and archival futures

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The conference particularly encourages proposals engaging with methodological experimentation, interdisciplinary approaches, and comparative perspectives across the Baltic Sea region and Visegrád countries. 

 

There is no conference fee. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide travel or accommodation funding, so participants are kindly asked to arrange their own expenses. 

Please submit an abstract of 250–300 words and a short biographical note (up to 100 words). Panels and pre-constituted roundtables are also welcome.

 

Contact persons: lina.jancoriene@lmta.lt, aiste.racaityte@gmail.com

 

Conference organizing committee: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė (LMTA, LKTI), Prof. Dr. Natalija Arlauskaitė (VU TSPMI, LMTA), Lect. Dr. Mantė Valiūnaitė (LMTA), Lect. Monika Gimbutaitė (LMTA), Lect. Aistė Račaitytė (LMTA), Sonata Žalneravičiūtė

 

Conference Paper Submission Form: https://forms.gle/evCHNdTNCTjkdcbg7