Hello all, the Future shorts, short film festival will be playing at the ‘screen on the green’ in Islington on the 26th of Feb. The highly esteemed reading collective usually convening on a Thursday will be uprooted from its usual home at the IOE to attend what is billed as: “Future Shorts takes a look at love and sex in all its twisted forms in an all new selection of the world’s finest short films. Featuring Sundance 2009 winner ‘Lies’, Chen Kaige’s BAFTA and Golden Palm-winning ‘Zhanxiou Village’, something special from the legendary Abbas Kiarostami and much more.

There will be a reading provided by the dictator that will be discussed afterwards in the comfort of one of upper st fine drinking establishments. I will be procuring some tickets on Saturday but otherwise book early to avoid displacement.

A long-neglected focus in media studies has been the role sexuality and gender play in the constitution of media practices and representations. While queer studies and feminism have made inroads into film and cultural studies, gender, sexuality and ‘sexualness’ still remain remarkably absent in global media studies and even more so when we look at media in Asia and Africa. This absence is rather striking as arguably many of today’s most visible media practices involve ‘sex’ in one form or another: whether this has to do with the moral panics around new technology in India, the complex role women’s sexuality has in the Middle Eastern politics to the significant role online pornography has had in the evolution of the Internet globally.