HomeReflecting on the richness of poor cinemas around the world in the 21st century

Reflecting on the richness of poor cinemas around the world in the 21st century

Penser la richesse des cinémas pauvres dans le monde au XXIe siècle

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Published on Monday, February 23, 2026

Abstract

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This symposium aims to put into global perspective the aesthetic and economic issues as well as the analysis of the creative and distribution processes that were at the heart of the study days devoted to low-budget cinema in France, which took place in 2024. Without romanticising the lack of resources, how can we define the theoretical, practical, political, economic and aesthetic contours of these ‘poor cinemas’ in a contemporary international context? What specific filmmaking processes ensure its existence? What original film forms emerge from it? What parallel distribution channels do these films require to be created and defended? 

Announcement

Français English

- 1 and 2 December 2026 in Paris (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, in partnership with the Cinémathèque idéale des banlieues du monde).

- 3 December 2026 in Grenoble – with reservations – (Université Grenoble-Alpes).

Argument

On the margins of industrial economies and dominant models of film production, poor cinemas around the world are engaging in other ways of creating and viewing films. Poor cinemas refers with very small budgets relative to the average scale of production in the country concerned, and intended for screening in cinemas. This contemporary investment in the possibilities of filmmaking based on an awareness of economic means has given rise to a prolific independent production industry that is autonomous of institutionalised public and private funding sources. Thus, in countries with a strong film industry, whether auteur or industrial, a parallel film economy is emerging. In countries of the Global majority, where funding is often fluctuating, this economy often becomes the condition for the survival of a national cinema. Furthermore, despite significant local funding, the dependence of certain film ecosystems in countries of the Global majority on so-called Western funding raises the question of political and aesthetic independence and, therefore, the continuation of colonial dynamics. Poor cinema can therefore be a cinema that refuses to conform to the dominant economic conditions and dynamics, as well as being driven by necessity when there is no other option. 

Without romanticising the lack of resources, how can we define the theoretical, practical, political, economic and aesthetic contours of these ‘poor cinemas’ in a contemporary international context? What specific filmmaking processes ensure its existence? What original film forms emerge from it? What parallel distribution channels do these films require to be created and defended? What recurrences and differences inherent in poor cinema appear at each stage of production and distribution, depending on geographical, social and cultural contexts?

This symposium aims to put into global perspective the aesthetic and economic issues as well as the analysis of the creative and distribution processes that were at the heart of the study days devoted to low-budget cinema in France, which took place in 2024 (University of Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis / University of Bordeaux-Montaigne / Bordeaux International Independent Film Festival). Through this change of scale, both in terms of the film corpus and the geographies of knowledge production, we wish to highlight issues that cut across the existence and expansion of poor cinema, considering it as a particularly inventive space for contemporary filmmaking, while taking into account its ambivalences and difficulties in a global context of crisis and attacks on creative freedom.

We encourage papers on filmographies that are still little known in the European context, and which address one or more of the following areas of reflection:

Axis 1. Definition of a concept and theoretical variations.

‘Cinematic writing is not just an artistic gesture: it is a movement of thought, it is also an economic action,’ declared Jean-Louis Comolli in his 2003 essay ‘Pour un cinéma pauvre’ (In Defence of Poor Cinema). The director and critic made this assertion, noting that ‘the fifty or even hundred most important films of the last thirty years are fairly poor, or very poor films.’ By focusing on this ‘limited resources’ film production, he questioned "the right relationship between the artistic gesture and the expense it entails. Fair, that is to say, necessary and sufficient. Just as small budgets do not prevent great films from being made, big budgets do not prevent poor films from being made.‘ In this way, Comolli brought up to date, in the digital age, the aesthetic, political and economic issues already at the heart of the manifesto “Por un cine imperfecto” (1969) by Cuban director Julio García Espinosa, written at the time of the ’Third Cinema‘, or that of the lesser-known Breton film group Torr e Benn, who wrote in their 1975 brochure, ’We have chosen a poor cinema to make rich films".

In the 2010s, this concept of ‘poor cinema’ was taken up by filmmakers from working-class backgrounds. For them, it is not an ideal option but the only way to make films, given that public funding systems are illusory meritocracies. Thus, Argentine filmmaker and writer César González, who has made much of his work in the underprivileged neighbourhood where he grew up, asks in his book El fetichismo de la marginalidad (2021, p. 16): "Wouldn't it be more consistent to film in a poor way where there is an overdose of poverty?” In his manifesto ’For a Masonic Cinema‘ (2020), Brazilian director Lincoln Péricles advocates for a cinema “that helps build the neighbour's house and one's own" using the resources at hand.

So where does the concept of ‘poor cinema’ begin and end, depending on the historical, geographical and cultural context in which it takes place? What common features can be identified in poor cinema produced in different countries? If our criterion is a budget significantly lower than that of commercial cinema—even ‘auteur’ cinema—in the countries concerned, what are the different budget scales with which these poor films are made? Is it doable and desirable to propose a general definition of poor cinema? What are the main variables to consider in order to refine and nuance its use?

Presentations may thus fall within the following areas:

  • What theoretical markers and critical texts allow us to historicise this idea in order to better understand its contemporary significance? How do the thoughts of filmmakers in this regard reshuffle the cards of this notion?
  • What variations on the expression ‘poor cinema’ exist in different languages, depending on the cultural context of the filmmakers? How do these variations transform the texts of García Espinosa and Comolli?

When we talk about ‘poor cinema’, should we not also clarify the social classes from which the directors concerned and their teams come? To what extent can making ‘poor films’ be paradoxically a luxury accessible only to the bourgeoisie, particularly because of the voluntary work it often involves? Conversely, do we see greater representation in these cinemas of filmmakers from minorities (gender or racial), relegated to the economic margins due to difficulty in accessing mainstream funding? If so, how can we define poor cinema in terms of what it actually involves in material terms?

Axis 2. Aesthetic of poor cinemas.

This axis addresses the aesthetic issues specific to poor cinemas, arising from the conditions of its emergence, production methods and technologies used. Without ignoring the limitations imposed by a lack of resources, we will consider how certain characteristics associated with very low-budget cinema (poor image quality, discontinuity of narrative and form, visible signs of production, ‘amateurish’ acting, among other features) contribute to their aesthetic uniqueness. Thus, Tariq Teguia, in his film Inland (Algeria, 2008), by embracing the limitations of his semi-professional HD video camera, which produces blurring and overexposure – a ‘camera as it can’, as Pierre-Damien Huyghe (2012, p.42) – finds in this ‘flaw’ a means of representing the places of disappearance that are the border crossings in the Sahara (Lamoine, 2026).

We will also look at how certain film shoots taking place outside professional or institutional channels, sometimes without authorisation, whether spaced out over time and available at short notice or, on the contrary, carried out in a rapid gesture, in keeping with the urgency to show or express, manage to ‘make visible what was not seen’, as Jacques Rancière points out in relation to artists who set out ‘to change the benchmarks of what is visible and expressible’ (2008, p.72). One example that comes to mind is Saudade by Katsuya Tomita (Japan, 2011), produced by the Kuzoku collective, self-produced and shot over the course of a year in the city of Kôfu on the director's days off from his job as a truck driver. Its fragmented form mirrors the urban fabric in crisis and the chance encounters between characters who are construction workers, hip-hop singers or Brazilian immigrants.

For other filmmakers, it is also this freedom of creation, detached from the need for profitability, that allows them to experiment with radical aesthetic choices, associated for example with the choice of medium, the length of the film, and the crossover between fiction and documentary: such as La Flor by Mariano Llinás (Argentina, 2018), a film lasting over 13 hours, which was shot over a period of ten years by the El Pampero Cine collective.

Proposed studies may focus on a particular film, the work of a filmmaker or a national cinematography, at a given time or belonging to a movement or collective, or they may focus on aesthetic features common to several territories.

The following approaches can be explored:

  • The aesthetic richness of poor cinemas: how do economic conditions, depending on national or regional specificities, contribute to the invention and uniqueness of cinematic forms and devices created by limited means? From this perspective, how do poor cinemas, in their use of technology or in the materiality of their medium, fit into ‘a precarious aesthetic’ (Gaboury, 2021, p. 266)?
  • Palimpsest films (Daney, 1970, and Lindeperg, 2004): how do the obstacles or failures sometimes experienced due to a lack of resources (access to larger budgets being blocked by political censorship, institutional bias or commercial logic) affect the form of films, closing off certain possibilities while retaining traces of what they could have been? To what extent is the persistence of traces of production conditions left visible in the film characteristic of poor cinema?

Axis 3. Film production: genetic studies, working conditions and organization.

Papers in this axis will focus on how films are made, i.e. the creative and technical work involved in directing and producing films. Is there a specific way of organising work for films produced on a limited economy? Is this specificity due, for example, to the size of the crew? Are workers more likely to hold multiple positions and have more tasks and responsibilities than in big-budget film shoots? Are the relational and power dynamics on film sets rehashed, smoothed over, amplified, or similar? In what ways might the role of the filmmaker be different or called into question? Is the function of the ‘ auteur film’ as an instrument of dispossession of collaborators (Pacouret, 2025) challenged by certain collective practices, and if so, which ones?

We will also look at aspects of solidarity in the creative process. How do precarious economies enrich themselves through emotional ties within collaborative communities? How does the creation of collectives and cooperatives enable other ways of working, contrary to dominant and industrial structures or in resistance to hegemonic systems, based in particular on ideals of horizontality and knowledge transmission? We encourage communicators to propose innovative research methods to document, understand and think about films ‘from the perspective of the act of making’ (Zvonkine, 2019).

This symposium will provide an opportunity to discuss (non-exhaustive list):

  • Collectives and organisations of poor cinema: how do collectives (such as Antes muerto cine in Argentina), associations, cooperatives (such as Coocine in Colombia) and shared film laboratories (such as LEC in Mexico or L'Abominable in France) structure the practices of poor cinema? What principles of horizontality, solidarity, affection and friendship underpin these modes of organisation? What political ideals were they founded on and what practical limitations do they now face?
  • Work, economics and production conditions: is volunteering, which structures the production of poor cinemas, a form of exploitation or an alternative to the dominant profit-driven logic? How is working time outside of filming (development, post-production) distributed and what are the social and economic implications? What strategies and economic models are poor cinema workers developing? How is the role of producer being redefined on the margins of the industry? What modes of financing (equity, crowdfunding, individual support for creation, etc.) make these films possible?
  • Methodologies and case studies: How can production documents (budgets, remuneration, team composition, service sheets) be analysed to understand these practices? What role should interviews with crew members play? How can participant and non-participant observations on film sets renew the approach to these subjects?
  • Practices, territories and circulation: what role does the participation of non-professionals, particularly those from the filming locations, play in these productions? How can we think about amateur or ‘low-altitude’ productions (Zéau, Turquety, 2022) and ‘local’ cinema (Zéau, 2025) in the field of poor cinemas? What relationships, tensions and circulations exist between these practices and so-called professional circuits?
  • Networks, exile and social relations: how do cinema in exile and diaspora cinema contribute to the (re)constitution of transnational networks? How do social relations of gender, class and race structure the conditions of production and forms of poor cinemas? What qualitative and quantitative approaches can be used to develop a sociology of this phenomenon?

Axis 4. Programming, promotion, distribution, audiences, archiving of the present.

This last axis questions the ways in which poor cinemas gain visibility and recognition downstream of the production process, in an industry largely structured by the visibility of awards and the challenges of institutional recognition (Delaporte, 2022). The aim is to analyse the central role of programming mechanisms (festivals, film libraries, alternative venues, platforms, activist or community networks) in creating symbolic value for these films and to understand how encounters with the public are structured through these different instances.

Some initiatives already offer explicit frameworks for these practices, such as the Cine Pobre festival in Mexico City, dedicated to self-financed films, or the Contrebande competition at the Bordeaux International Independent Film Festival, dedicated to works made ‘outside the traditional financing schemes’. More broadly, while international festivals occasionally include films made with limited resources, sections explicitly dedicated to these methods remain rare. This raises several questions: how are these works selected, contextualised, supported and narrated in light of their mode of production? What audiences do they reach, and through what symbolic, geographical and social mediations? What distribution channels specifically dedicated to poor cinemas exist on a global scale, and how do they work to highlight these film industries?

Thinking about the distribution of films made with limited resources also involves questioning the concrete conditions of their circulation. Historically, the presence of filmmakers has been a prerequisite for organising screenings and discussions; but what happens to this logic when travel fees or the costs of subtitling and translating films have to be taken into account? This tension invites us to rethink the forms of distribution, circulation and encounter, as well as the economic and symbolic models that underpin them.

This axis also proposes to examine contemporary forms of archiving the present by questioning the traces left by precarious, sometimes ephemeral and often fragile cinemas, both materially and institutionally. This reflection can be illuminated by Lincoln Péricles' call for a "film library of the quebradas" in recent years, which highlights the need for autonomous preservation of images produced in working-class neighbourhoods, as well as by the project of the Cinémathèque idéale des banlieues du monde (Ideal film library of the suburbs of the world), initiated by Alice Diop in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou and the Ateliers Médicis. Through the joint study of distribution, reception and conservation practices, the aim is to understand how these cinemas contribute to the invisible writing of film history, via different distribution methods, while revealing the blind spots, hierarchies and tensions that run through film memory policies at the local and international levels.

Below is a non-exhaustive list of topics we would like to see addressed:

  • What are the programming mechanisms of poor cinemas: what selection criteria, editorial lines, institutional and alternative frameworks are put in place to try to ‘see differently’ (Rastegar, 2016)? What role do international festivals play in promoting certain poor cinemas, and how do programmers contribute to the production of symbolic value and the visibility of these films? How can ‘ethical programming’ (Colta, 2019) be implemented in precarious contexts? Finally, how can we conceive of the concrete implementation of ‘decolonized film festivals worlds’ that would shift existing hierarchies and redistribute power relations (Dovey, Sendra, 2023)?
  • What complementarities, hierarchies and rivalries are established between festivals, film libraries, alternative venues and platforms in distribution circuits? How do the transnational circulations of poor cinemas reconfigure the hierarchies of visibility on an international scale, between solidarity networks and geopolitical power relations? To what extent do these circulations contribute to the production, in national contexts of reception, of ‘imaginary territories’ of foreign cinematographies (Rueda, 2018)? How do cinema in exile and diaspora cinema contribute to the (re)constitution of transnational networks?
  • What forms of recognition and legitimation—awards, labels, residencies, support—influence the trajectories of films? Conversely, what forms do alternative and self-distribution practices take (activist, community, travelling or non-commercial screenings) and what relationships do these films have with their audiences?

What conservation policies and memory issues characterise the archiving of the present for films from poor cinemas?

Terms and conditions of participation

Titles and proposals for presentations in English or French (max. 500 words), accompanied by a short biography, followed by a bibliography, should be sent before 10 April 2026 to the email address cinema.pauvre@gmail.com

The answers will be given in mid-May 2026.

We encourage contributions from both academia and professional practice.

Organisation committee

  • Claire Allouche (lecturer in film studies, Université Grenoble-Alpes).
  • Émilie Lamoine (lecturer in film studies, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne).
  • Ariane Papillon (PhD in film studies, A.T.E.R. at ENS Lyon).
  • Paula Rodríguez Polanco (PhD candidate in film studies, A.T.E.R. at Université Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis).
  • Natacha Seweryn (PhD candidate in film studies, A.T.E.R. at Université Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis).

Scientific committee

  • Claire Allouche (University Grenoble Alpes, France)
  • Mathieu Capel (Tokyo University, Japan)
  • Farah-Clémentine Dramani-Issifou (University Aix-Marseille, France / Harvard, Chair of the Harvard McMillan-Stewart Fellowship in Distinguished Filmmaking, USA)
  • Marcelo Ikeda (Universidade Federal do Ceará, Brasil)
  • Sonia Kerfa (University Grenoble Alpes, France)
  • Emilie Lamoine (University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France)
  • Libertad Gills (University of Leeds, United-Kingdom)
  • Victor Morozov (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, Caragiale National University of Theatre and Film of Bucharest, Romania)
  • Ariane Papillon (University Paris 8 and École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France)
  • Paula Rodríguez Polanco (University Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis, France)
  • Raquel Schefer (University Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, France)
  • Max Schleser (Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia)
  • Natacha Seweryn (University Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis, France)
  • Raphaël Szöllösy (University of Strasbourg, France)
  • Ikbal Zalila (University Manouba, Tunisia)
  • Eugénie Zvonkine (University Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis, France)

Places

  • Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - Centre Saint Charles
    Paris, France (75)
  • Maison de la Création et de l'Innovation - MaCI
    Grenoble, France (38)

Event attendance modalities

Full on-site event


Date(s)

  • Friday, April 10, 2026

Keywords

  • cinéma pauvre, cinéma mondial contemporain, théorie du cinéma, théorie des cinéastes, économie du cinéma, esthétique du cinéma, étude génétique, sociologie du travail appliquée au cinéma, programmation de films, conservation de films

Contact(s)

  • Claire ALLOUCHE
    courriel : claire [dot] allouche [at] univ-grenoble-alpes [dot] fr

Information source

  • Claire ALLOUCHE
    courriel : claire [dot] allouche [at] univ-grenoble-alpes [dot] fr

License

CC0-1.0 This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.

To cite this announcement

« Reflecting on the richness of poor cinemas around the world in the 21st century », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Monday, February 23, 2026, https://doi.org/10.58079/15qux

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