Drawing on insights from scholars and practitioners from around the globe, this series of talks situates practices of cinematic production, curation, and viewing in the context of human flourishing and public value.

An evolving phenomenon, the cinema is commonly understood to have expanded in response to technological innovations (e.g. the invention of sound, color stock, 3D technologies, or computer-generated images). What has been largely overlooked is the extent to which the cinema is currently being transformed by pressures arising from changing social expectations, especially as these relate to diversity, inclusion, and recognition, and to the requirements of a dignified life. 

If cinema in the wake of the talkies was a phenomenon situated within a normative space where viewers were assumed to be cognitively functional and fully in possession of the senses of sight and hearing, moving images are now increasingly mobilized in contexts of disability, medical treatment, and impairments caused by aging. Also, whereas harms incurred during cinematic production were once public secrets, such harms are increasingly considered unacceptable and profoundly at odds with the idea of cinematic works having aesthetic and artistic value. 

In short, there is considerable and clearly growing interest in seeing cinema through the lens of human flourishing, as a means of achieving a measure of well-being across a human lifespan or during periods of illness; or as a way of making rich sensory experiences available to disabled communities in the context of an appropriately inclusive society. Equally important is the now unavoidable demand that involvement in the creative industries, as a practitioner, should be compatible with human flourishing. That is, the conditions of creative work should be conducive to physical and psychological health. 
Talks featured in the Film and Human Flourishing series examine the different dimensions of the ongoing transformation of the cinema with an eye to capturing the cinema’s potential as a vehicle for public value based on human well-being.