DIASPORA POPULAR FILMS: NEW APPROACHES TOWARDS A DECOLONIZATION OF THE GAZE
Catarina Laranjeiro
Institute of Contemporary History NOVA FCSH, Lisbon
THURSDAY, 16.05. | 6:30 pm
Votiv Kino, Gr. Saal | TICKETS (Freier Eintritt)
This lecture discusses peripheral and low-budget cinematography, released on an alternative circuit to the conventional film market, when produced by African immigrants in Europe, in what may be called a Diaspora Popular Cinema. It follows the pioneering film productions in Nigeria – Nollywood – where this phenomenon emerged in the 1990s and quickly spread among other countries on the African continent. Digital platforms, informal cinema rooms, and the trade in independently produced DVDs were forms of distribution for these films, which brought together countries of origin and their respective diasporas. While immigrants and their descendants started out as the main consumers of these films (and consequently financiers), they quickly also became producers. Diaspora Popular Cinema was initially inspired by the peripheral cinemas of the countries of origin, but it quickly distanced itself from them in order to challenge the position of subalternity occupied by its authors in European society.
This keynote lecture engages in a dialogue with the field of film studies and explores how popular diaspora cinema contributes to the “decolonisation of the gaze” that takes place in the field of visual culture. It particularly discusses how this cinematographic movement is generating new agents – directors, producers, and spectators – who play a leading role in creating visual tools capable of subverting the most canonical and Eurocentric cinematographic approaches.
Keynote held in English.
Film Screening: FOGO NO LODO – FIRE IN THE MUD
FOGO NO LODO
Biography
Catarina Laranjeiro is a visual anthropologist holding a Ph.D. in Post-Colonialism and Global Citizenship. In the last ten years, she has researched the relationship between cinema and cosmological images during the liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau, also part of her master thesis short film“Pabia di Aos” (2013). Currently, she is conducting a six-year research project about vernacular film production in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and their diasporas in Europe.
