Contributor Guidelines

Offscreen welcomes unsolicited original (i.e. not published elsewhere) submissions, but strongly recommends all interested parties read the description of the journal and take some time to peruse the site to get a sense of the journal’s interests. Prospective writers often email to ask about upcoming theme issues. First off, if you haven't already, I recommend you subscribe to Offscreen, which will ensure notices of each new issue and subsequent Call for Papers or theme issue alerts. I am always looking to improve the diversity of my writing/writers so I encourage articles featuring approaches to less travelled areas of film (Indigenous film, queer/trans work, disability, etc.). And features on and about Canadian cinema remain a priority for Offscreen, given that we are a Canadian based journal with Canadian funding support. We always welcome unsolicited proposals, but here is a list of some potential upcoming subject areas we are currently working towards.

Upcoming Thematic Issues

1. African Cinema
2. Film Noir
3. Canadian Fantastic Cinema
4. Iranian Cinema
5. Depictions of Italian Culture in Quebec Cinema
6. Sound in the Horror Film
7. Experimental Cinema
8. Precarity and Labor in Contemporary Cinema

These are broad areas. If you have a specific question about any of these themes please feel free to email the editor, Donato Totaro. Otherwise submissions should be emailed to the editor, Donato Totaro following the format guidelines below. 

Format Guidelines

Your text should be formatted in either rich text or Microsoft Word format.

All film titles should be in italics and followed by the director and date, e.g., Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922). Paragraphs should be set off with a single space and no indent at the start of the paragraph. For citing your bibliographic references please use the parenthetical author system with conventional brackets, e.g., “In deference to the time I invested, I’m including, at the end of this essay, a list of films I’d planned to include in the film canon” (Schrader 35). And then include a bibliography at the end citing full bibliographic information, e.g.:

Paul Schrader. “Canon Fodder.” Film Comment. September/October 2006, 33-49.

Use endnotes only for explanatory and digressive comments. Rather than following the Word formatting for endnotes place endnotes in between double brackets as such [[This is the proper method for endnotes.]].

Any accompanying photos should be included separately, in JPG format at a maximum size of 1000 pixels wide, 72 dpi resolution. Our use of photographs falls under the Fair Dealing exception of the Canadian Copyright Act but it is the author’s responsibility to provide captions that source who the rights holder is for any photographs submitted (i.e. name of the DVD or Blu Ray distributor if a frame grab, name of the photographer, name of the film festival if provided by them, publicist, etc.). 

Minimum length requirements are as follows: 1000 words for book/film/dvd reviews and festival reports, 2000 words for articles/essays.

Upon acceptance we will need a brief author bio (70-100 words) and a photograph (400 by 400 pixels in size) that will appear at the end of the article in the author byline. Presently, Offscreen is sometimes able to pay contributors a small stipend according to word length, with the maximum being $100.00 Canadian currency. This could change according to our budgetary status.