Stories in Motion: Creating a Living Archive of Place Through Community Short Film Exhibition

This article explores how advocacy, promotional, and community-made short films can be reinterpreted through practices of exhibition and curation. Using Stories in Motion, a place-based short film exhibition developed through the Cultures of Film programme in Kirklees, West Yorkshire, we argue that commissioned and community-made short films exceed their original instrumental functions when curated collectively. Bringing together more than sixty films, Stories in Motion used thematic curation and collective viewing to create connections between works that would not ordinarily be screened together. As a result, the exhibition functioned as a form of cultural mapping, revealing cultural practices that emerge across multiple films rather than within individual works. We propose that the exhibition creates a living archive of place: active, participatory, and continually reshaped through exhibition, discussion, and reinterpretation. In doing so, we position place-based short film exhibition as both a research method and a place-making practice.