FBK and Religion Today Filmfestival

During the nineteenth edition of the Religion Today Film Festival dedicated to women and religions, the Center for Religious Studies of Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) has renewed its longstanding collaboration with the Festival through an innovative contribution. Researchers at FBK’s Center for Religious Studies worked together with those from the ICT center of the Foundation (especially with the Technologies of Vision Research group) on the presence of religious content within the Netflix tv series Orange is The New Black and Sense8. The researchers extracted the most common words and key expressions of these two works, analyzing a dataset made up of 51 subtitles, 203 reviews and 2,085 comments to both series. The data were then provided to the speakers for the debate.

FBK researchers prepared as well the augmented reality supported exhibit “Still-frame: an augmented reality supported exhibit on women and religion”, using the Wikitude Studio service. The exhibit, consisting of 20 frames of films that deal with the relationship between women and religions was visited during the festival period. Each frame, if framed with the smartphone, would activate a series of multimedia contents of different kinds: words, images and short video clips. About 200 people downloaded the app and visited the multimedia exhibit. The researchers with the Center for Religious Studies also offered two conferences.

The first one (October 8, 2016), About Netflix: religious and gender issues within tv series, explored the presence of religious content in the television series considered. The audience included some twenty young religion scholars from universities throughout Italy.

The second conference, On Eve’s side. Religions and gender relations (October 13, 2016), has seen the exceptional participation around the same table of religious women from different traditions, coordinated by an anthropologist: their voices took turns to discuss the role of women within religious communities and as a bridge to multi-secular society.