COMFORT MEDIA WORKSHOP

Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts, Prague (FAMU)
Smetanovo nábř. 1012/2, 110 00 Staré Město
22. 4. 2025 // 2pm – 5pm
Room U7 (3rd floor)

The workshop is a part of DKR AMU research project Cozy Viewership: Comfort Media and Audience Emotional Support

Attendees and Presentations

Pietari Kaapa, The (un)hygge: Finding Coziness in Nordic Miserabilism
Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Study, University of Warwick
Pietari Kaapa is Professor in Media and Communications at the University of Warwick. He works in the field of environmental media studies with a focus on media management and production studies. He has published widely in the field of environmental media studies, including Transnational Ecocinemas (Intellect 2013), Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas (Bloomsbury, 2014), Environmental Management of the Media: Industry, Policy, Practice (Routledge 2018) and Film and Television Production in the Age of Climate Change (Palgrave 2022). He is PI of the AHRC Global Green Media Network, including several co-produced industry reports on green production and management: www.globalgreenmedianetwork.org/reports

Richard Nowell: Comfy, Cozy, Cheery, (Scary): New Hollywood & Metamodern Horror
Department of Audiovisual Theory and History, FAMU
Richard Nowell is a researcher and a lecturer at FAMU. His research and teaching focuses on American audiovisual culture, with an emphasis on historical trends in film production, assembly, marketing, and distribution. He is currently part of a research team examining Comfort Media, and is working on an edited collection about horror film promotion on the US market. He has published internationally on Hollywood and the Cold War, Youth-oriented cinema, and especially horror. He is also the author of Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle (Bloomsbury), the editor of Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror Cinema (Bloomsbury), and his work can be seen in various collections and journals including Cinema Journal, the Journal of Film & Video, and the New Review of Film and Television Studies.

Jindřiška Bláhová, Be Good, the Socialist Way: Reframing Steven Spielberg’s E.T. in Communist Czechoslovakia
Department of Audiovisual Theory and History, FAMU
Jindřiška Bláhová is a film historian and Assistant Professor in Film at the Department of Audiovisual Theory and History at FAMU. She is also the head of the Department and head of the Centre for Doctoral Studies at the Academy of Performing Arts. She specializes in history of film festivals, film culture during socialism and post-socialist transformation. Her studies have been published internationally in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Film History, Studies in European Cinema and Post Script. She wrote a number of book chapters on home video, production culture, and intersection of distribution and politics. She most recently edited a book on the Cold War histories of the The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (NFA, 2023), to which she contributed three chapters. She is team leader of Comfort Media research project and continues her research on the IFF Karlovy Vary.

Noel Brown, The Feel-Good Film: A Contextual Approach
School of Creative and Performing Arts, Liverpool Hope University
Noel Brown is Associate Professor in Film at Liverpool Hope University, UK. He has written several books on aspects of children’s film, family entertainment and animation, including Contemporary Hollywood Animation (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), The Children’s Film: Genre, Nation and Narrative (Columbia University Press, 2017), British Children’s Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2016) and The Hollywood Family Film (I.B. Tauris, 2012). He is also editor of The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Film (Oxford University Press, 2022), and series editor of ‘Children’s Film and Television’ for Edinburgh University Press, for which his next book, Radical Children's Film and Television (2025), is the inaugural volume. In addition, he has published on the feel-good film genre, comedy, fandom and science fiction and fantasy in a range of international publications.

Tereza Fousek Krobová: No Game for Old (Wo)men: Playing video Games as a Comfort Strategy for Female Older Adults in Czechia
Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University / Department of Game Studies, FAMU
Tereza Fousek Krobová is a game theorist. Her research focuses on the gender aspects of digital games in the context of representation, audiences, and the gaming industry. She teaches gender, cultural, and game studies at several tertiary education institutions (Charles University’s Faculty of Social Sciences, FAMU, NYU, and Scholastika). She is a member of a research group that focuses on the Czech game industry (PRIMUS grant, FSS CU) and a group that studies the archiving of Czech games (NAKI, FAMU). She works as the dramaturge for the DVA3 show on Czech TV. She is a member of FAMU’s Comfort Media research team.