Supply chain cinema: producing global film workers Film Studies Speaker Series: Dr Kay Dickinson

Dr Kay Dickinson will introduce her upcoming book Supply chain cinema: producing global film workers (BFI, 2024).

Why are big budget films typically made across an array of seemingly dissociated sites? Beyond such movies' narrative requirements for specific locations, their production journeys exemplify the principles of the supply chain, whose core imperative is to nimbly and opportunistically route manufacturing through wherever is most amenable and efficient. The motion picture supply chain chooses certain places for partial offshored production over others. From the tax breaks designed to attract foreign projects to the facilities, infrastructures, logistical support and expertise that service them, the benefits a production site peddles impacts communities on the ground in lasting, material ways. This presentation examines two such sites, how its workers are trained to acquiesce to the mandates of the supply chain, and the impact such labour has upon them.

Over the last decade, hundreds of big-budget films have been partially shot in the United Arab Emirates. What does the UAE furnish to such projects? What do the local and majority migrant crews provide to these initiatives? And how is the UAE gearing up its education system, largely through English-medium foreign franchise universities, to train a supply chain-ready workforce?

Likewise, the UK is a key destination for supply chain cinema, to the point where certain Hollywood giants elect to make more of their films here than in the USA. Logistical imperatives drive these choices and impel dangerously long working hours for British crews. How do the ensuing pressures, precarities, dislocations and frenzied sleeplessness endured by these professionals advantage financial sector stakeholders, rather than a more traditional film industry formation?

Kay Dickinson teaches Film and Television Studies and convenes the MA Creative Arts and Industries at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of several other books, including Arab film and video manifestos: forty-five years of the moving image amid revolution (Palgrave, 2018), and Arab cinema travels: transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and beyond (BFI, 2016).