How do you, as a film professional, deal with questions surrounding diversity and inclusion in 2024? Awareness and good intentions are a start. But they are often not enough. So how do you develop useful tools to deal with your own (pre)judgments/assumptions and to start conversations about them with others during each stage of filmmaking, from development to set or post?

Winnie Roseval (diversity & inclusion consultant and researcher at the Inclusive Education professorship, The Hague University of Applied Sciences) therefore developed a training especially for FilmForward based on the concept of ‘positionality’. Positionality is a way of understanding why we know what we know and therefore why we don’t see other perspectives; our blind spots. In this way, we can investigate how we can make room for those stories that have until now been told in a stigmatizing way, or had no place at all. How do those stories, stories that belong to the norm and the story that you as a professional bring with you relate to each other?

These perspectives determine which films we like and why, which characters we want to identify with and how we want to approach our work. But they are also (other) stories with which we can enrich our worldview and work better together by seeing where they meet.

The aim of the one-day ‘Positionality’ training is to actively work with these concepts based on our own experiences. These are tools that you can then actively deploy and use to inspire others. We will work with case studies submitted by the participants themselves. Have you had such an experience of an uncomfortable situation on set? On reflection, has your perspective influenced your work too much? When could you have paid more attention to the input that someone else provided based on their positionality?