Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media

We often use the word "community" to describe our work as film curators, which involves playing many different roles while liaising between film and arts nonprofits, cultural institutions, and exhibition venues. Community refers to our audiences, missions, and connections to local cities, towns, funders, and proprietors. Community further encompasses our economic impact, collaborative programming strategies, and the sense of belonging that both independent and arthouse theaters and festivals cultivate among their membership and attendees. We stretch the word as far as it will take us. But the term community, and its deployment in nonprofit work, has become excessively porous. As Miranda Joseph observes in Against the Romance of Community, it serves to insulate organizations from critique, even while evoking a sense of connectedness. Alternately presented as a way to escape or humanize our current modes of production, Joseph warns that the romantic ideal of community actually legitimizes capitalism. She defines "community" as a discursive practice that mobilizes "local" and "face-to-face relations," which are constantly contradicted in a world driven by "global and faceless" capital. Moreover, the rhetorical use of a term like "community" asserts "boundaries between us and them, boundaries that are naturalized through reference to place or race or culture or identity, where capital would seem to denature, crossing all borders and making everything, everyone, equivalent."¹ Bearing these articulations in mind, we ask, amid a global pandemic, what does "community" mean for festivals and film exhibition when "face-to-face," in-person gatherings are no longer possible? Does shared virtual space really recreate togetherness? Or does it, like the pandemic, [End Page 274] expose something more fundamental about the ways in which we practice, create, and engage with "community"?

We co-write this piece as two film festival programmers who have collaborated on many projects in the past.² Most recently, we worked together on the Arab Film Fest Collab (AFFC), a virtual Arab film festival in the United States presented by four Arab/Arab American arts nonprofits: Mizna in the Twin Cities, Minnesota; the Arab Film and Media Institute (AFMI) in San Francisco; the Arab American National Museum (AANM) in Dearborn, Michigan; and ArteEast in New York City.³ Already working with limited capacities and no longer serving geographically distinct audiences, we decided to pool our resources to collectively present a joint festival. We came to the project through our work with Mizna; Alison Kozberg oversaw operations and festival management for the AFFC, and Michelle Baroody served on the programming committee alongside representatives from each organization. At Mizna, though we offer talks and classes throughout the year and publish a literary journal, the film festival is a cornerstone of our programming, and we felt a strong sense of commitment to our community of patrons, staff, volunteers, and long-term supporters to proceed as promised. As was the case for a variety of film exhibitors, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted all four organizations' regular, in-person programming, positioning collaboration and virtual exhibition as practical solutions. The AFFC, which ran entirely online from December 3 to 13, 2020, consisted of synchronous performances and talkbacks as well as screenings by Arab and Arab American filmmakers and artists, all hosted by Eventive's virtual festival platform. Shifting to online programming required us to navigate virtual event platforms, redesign our websites, and reimagine our definitions of local and premiere and, by extension, our relationships with filmmakers.

This essay traces what COVID has revealed to us about our own notions of community and collaboration within practices of festival exhibition and nonprofit film programming. We use the AFFC as our primary example, but we also reflect on how funding and branding make collaborative work between nonprofits difficult (and sometimes impossible), because they function by logics of scarcity and individuality, which often mean abandoning our appeals to "community" in order to make money and stay afloat.⁴ This critique is not meant to call out our own organizations or our collaborators on the AFFC, particularly in light of how organizations specializing in Arab and Arab American cinema are often impacted by broader logics of scarcity...