Slums on Screen: World Cinema, Documentary Film and the 'Planet of Slums'

   —   One billion people call slums, favelas or bidonvilles their home, making it a reasonable claim to describe our world as a ‘planet of slums’. But how has this harsh reality been depicted on screen? It seems that with blockbusters like Slumdog Millionaire (2008) the Third World megacity slum has become a common motif. Yet, in fact, slums have been a popular setting of films already since the birth of cinema. We will discuss the major strategies that filmmakers employed to depict life in the slums and ask whether filmmakers exploit slums for commercial (‘slumsploitation’) or aesthetic reasons (‘aestheticisation of poverty’), whether slum-dwellers are given a voice or agency, if their environment and lifestyle become romanticised or exoticised, whether there is a difference between fiction and documentary slum worlds and if there is an ethics of representing poverty on screen.       —   Day 1 will give an overview of the sociology and global dimensions of The Planet of Slums (Mike Davis 2007). We will then proceed on Day 2 with documentary film and photography, while the third day will have well-known fiction films like Slumdog Millionaire or the favela film City of God (2002) as its topic.