Gillian Youngs chairs the industry panel at the Cine-Excess International Film Festival and Conference

Gillian Youngs, Professor of Creative and Digital Economy, chaired for the fourth year running the industry panel at the Cine-Excess International Film Festival and Conference on global cult film cultures, held this year in Birmingham November 10-12. Cine-Excess X ‘Cult Genres, Traditions and Bodies: A Decade of Excess’ featured screenings, student panels and films and research presentations.

‘The industry panel has become a regular feature in recent years and I really enjoy chairing it because we look at cutting edge areas of innovation and there is always a lively exchange across the film makers and industry experts on the panel and the researchers and film enthusiasts in the audience’, said Gillian.

This year the industry panel was titled ‘Guaranteed to Make You Shudder: New Online Platforms for Terror’ and the discussion centred on how new online portals are challenging the orthodoxies of distribution while also contributing to an upsurge in popularity for new cult genre content including through crowdfunding structures.

‘I’m viewing it as a new economy of horror and cult film in which audiences and their tastes and preferences can become an integral part of what gets made and when through crowd-funding, for example. They may have to sign up and then wait a while for the experience while the film is made but the final product may even carry their name as part of the support crowd. Old distinctions between production and distribution and producers and audiences are disrupted, challenging the ways in which we view the market and roles within it as well as processes driving aesthetics. Fascinating,’ Gillian commented.

One of the highlights of the festival was the UK premiere of Tax Shelter Terrors, an hour long documentary on the hidden history of Canadian cult cinema, directed by Xavier Mendik, Professor of Cult Cinema Studies at Birmingham City University and Director of Cine-Excess.

Image: Gillian Youngs