The Student Scientific Circle of Film Criticism and Analysis “Akcja” cordially invites participation in the National Scientific Conference “Who Holds the Camera? Cinema as a Medium of Identity – gender, class, nationality.” Date: 8–9 May 2026. Place: Faculty of "Artes Liberales" UW, Dobra 72, conference hall (Warsaw). The aim of this year’s conference is a deep, interdisciplinary reflection on the relationship between the film medium and broadly understood identity – both of creators and of viewers and reception communities. We are interested in cinema as a space for negotiating social position, expressing minority experiences and building (or undermining) dominant cultural narratives. We want to examine how the socio‑political context influences the choice of subjects, aesthetics and film language, production models, and distribution and reception strategies. We will pay special attention to categories of gender (including female, feminist and intersectional perspectives), social class and nationality, as well as the experiences of disability, migration, queerness and postcoloniality. Topics include: cinema as a space for the expression of minority groups (ethnic, national, linguistic, religious, queer); the female perspective in film: directors, cinematographers, screenwriters – creative practices and systemic barriers; POC creativity and issues of representation and narrative appropriation; queer cinema and its subversive strategies; autobiographical narratives about social mobility and their aesthetics; workers', peasant and peripheral cinema; screen representations of class experiences, precarity, labor migration; the film industry as a space of class inequality; film as a tool for building national identity; historical cinema and the politics of memory; the propagandistic potential of film; mechanisms of state and market censorship; diasporic cinema and transnational experience; cinema as a factor shaping individual identity and fan communities; “the films of our childhood” – nostalgic returns and their influence on taste and self-definition; political entanglements of film production and distribution; identities in the digital age and meta-cinema; platforms such as Filmweb, Letterboxd or IMDb as spaces for performing taste and building cultural identity; recommendation algorithms and identity bubbles. We encourage students and doctoral candidates to submit abstracts proposing 15–20 minute presentations related to the conference’s main theme. We await submissions until 8 April 2026. The application form is available online. Organizing committee: Natalia Sańko, Aneta Szelągowska, Natalia Nagraba, Radosław Stachnik, Zuzanna Chmielewska, Igor Zapadka, Paulina Wasiluk, Magdalena Siebuła, Wiktoria Piątek Scientific committee: Dr. Bolesław Racięski, Dr. Michał Oleszczyk
