Transnational Experiences of Cinema-Going: Interviewing Latin American Women in Barcelona and Milan

In this lecture I will discuss some theoretical and methodological challenges in the study of
cinema and migration. The topic will be framed in the context of my on-going project that
investigates the gendered aspects of migration through the lens of cinema-going, as well as the
habits of film and television consumption. The research is based on a group of in-depth
interviews to Latin-American women based in Milan and Barcelona, and involves an inter-
generational group of participants from different countries and with diverse backgrounds.

The talk will split in two main parts. In the first I will make some considerations about my
experience of conducting qualitative audience research during the COVD-19 pandemic.
Between April and December 2020, I’ve made 35 remote in-depth interviews, while my field-
work in Milan and Barcelona has been cancelled. The impossibility to establish in-person
relationships and being on site has significantly challenged my methodology as well as the
angle of my analysis, encouraging a more intimate and analytical approach. Specifically, the
interviews have revealed that the meanings assigned to cinema-going change with the
relationships and experiences of time and space brought on by migration in women’s lives. As
such, following Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s notion of border-crossing as “knowledge
production” (2013), I am testing the potential of the memories of leisure and cinema-going for
the everyday negotiation of borders and distance.

Drawing from the notions of ‘cultural’ and ‘critical proximity’ (La Pastina and Straubhaar,
2005; Georgiou, 2012), which refer to transnational systems of distribution and media
consumption, in the second part of the lecture I will discuss some parts of the interviews in
which the affective and material characters of cinema-going complicate the meanings of
presence and absence in transnational lives