Post by Katharine Sarikakis

Forthcoming this December. "Face/Off: Social Injustice in the Film Industry — Through the Eyes of Young Professionals" What does "social justice" actually mean to the people just entering European film? We asked 26 emerging professionals across seven countries: Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Ukraine. Their answers cut against the industry's story about itself. Cinema is a site of struggle for social justice twice over: in what reaches the screen, and in how films get made. Reading the interviews through Mark Banks's framework of creative justice, objective respect, parity of participation, reduction of harms , we show all three failing the people the industry most depends on. What's new: • AGE as a social-justice axis in its own right: we centre emerging professionals (18–35), not a generic "precariat." Generational gatekeeping becomes its own injustice. • We hold the on-screen and behind-the-camera questions together, refusing the split between film-as-text and film-as-industry. • We turn the lens on inclusion policy itself: how diversity can curdle into tokenism and sort people into "diverse" and "non-diverse." • We surface an uncomfortable counter-current: a turn among some younger people back toward "old-fashioned images," complicating any assumption that the next generation is uniformly progressive. What they told us: • 53.8% do not experience the industry as inclusive. • Diversity is too often "a flag to be flown," while funding and recognition recycle the same beneficiaries. • Women go unheard until a man repeats their point, and get handed "female" tasks regardless of role. • Migrant filmmakers meet closed networks; disability is barely addressed. Precarity as unpaid work "for the experience" is the entry fee. And yet they are agents, not only critics: refusing to book crew who harass, prioritising representation over profit, pushing companies toward practices that have become "necessary for survival." Our argument: reciprocity, not charity. Diversity is not a problem to be managed but the route to a more democratic, more authentic cinema. The best films are never a "one-man job." With my co-authors Aliki Chatziefraimidou , Gentiana Ramadani , Simon Haslauer and Mariia Yeroshkina, from the REBOOT project (Reviving, Boosting, Optimising and Transforming European Film Competitiveness), funded by REBOOT Horizon Europe horizon Europe —GA 10109476 University of Vienna Media Governance & Industries Research Lab "Face/Off" appears in Film, Storytelling, and Social Transformation: Cinematic Justice, ed. Martin Hall (York St. John University ) Routledge , in the Cinema and Social Justice series. December 2026. #SocialJustice #CreativeJustice #FilmIndustry #EuropeanCinema #CreativeLabour #MediaGovernance #Diversity #Inclusion #GenderEquality #YoungFilmmakers #FilmStudies #MediaStudies #REBOOT #HorizonEurope