Luso-Brazilian Film Screenings: Diaspora & Exile @ the Media Commons Theatre

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese in collaboration with the University of Toronto Libraries would like to invite you to the Luso-Brazilian Film Screenings: Diaspora & Exile that will be held in the last 3 Thursdays of the month of November at the Media Commons Theatre (Robarts Library, 3rd floor).

PLACE    Media Commons Theatre (Robarts Library, 3rd Floor)
DATE    November 13, 20, and 27, 2014
TIME:    6:30pm to 9:30pm

Screening 1 (Nov 13, 2014):    Foreign Land (Terra Estrangeira, Brazil/Portugal, 1995) Directed by Walter Sales and Daniella Thomas. Introduced by João Pedro Vicente Faustino (Camões Instituto)
Screening 2 (Nov 20, 2014):    Beyond the Road (Além da Estrada, Brazil/Uruguay, 2012) Directed by Charly Braun. Introduced by Hudson Moura (Department of Spanish & Portuguese)
Screening 3 (Nov 27, 2014):    In Vanda’s Room (No Quarto da Vanda, Portugal, 2000) Directed by Pedro Costa. Introduced by Kass Banning (Cinema Studies Institute)
 Language

All movies are in Portuguese with English subtitles. Each movie will be introduced and contextualized by Luso-Brazilian studies specialists, and a Q&A session will follow each screening.

 Free Admission

Admission to this event is free, but please take the time to complete our event registration form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1SQsj-bbJVo76aOU42BjYsQhVdNGnLVsnXShVd74rd7I/viewform

 Organizers

Hudson Moura (Department of Spanish & Portuguese)

Fabiano Rocha (University of Toronto Libraries)

 Contact

For further information regarding this event, please contact fabiano.rocha@utoronto.ca

Critical Review: Sleepwalking Land

by Kelsey Cunningham (Major in Portuguese)


Sleepwalking Land directed by Teresa Prata (Terra Sonâmbula, Portugal/Mozambique, 2007), shows the viewer the necessity of stories and dreams to survive the brutality of warfare.

Mudinga, a 12 year-old boy who cannot remember his past, wanders with Tuahir, an old man, through the countryside of Mozambique. The pair travel aimlessly, gathering food and attempting to avoid the marauding gangs that plague the country. On their travels, they find a burnt-out bus littered with carbonized bodies.    Among the remains of the assault on the bus, the pair find a suitcase full of notebooks alongside the body of a man shot through the heart. The notebooks tell the story of war from a civilian victim’s perspective; Mudinga reads the pages aloud, giving voice to Kindzu’s own story of bitter loss and the physical and emotional wounds of war. Through these pages Mudinga also discovers possible clues to his identity and the identity of his mother. As Mudinga reads Kindzu’s diary aloud to the illiterate Tuahir, the audience wonders if perhaps the boy is inventing some of the story in order to justify his own hopes. As the plot progresses, reuniting Mudinga with his mother becomes the reason for the pair to go on.

A Sleepwalking Land is indeed the sense one gets from the depiction of Mozambique from this film, but the film does not mention any specific political group or even show any national symbols such as a flag or map. The film is meant to speak to the civilian casualties and suffering of any war, a place filled with sleepwalkers; people who are forced to hold on the dreams as their physically deprived and mentally drained bodies are tortured by the realities of human cruelty. Weakened but afloat in their own dreams, they are like the shell of a worn out bus drifting into the ocean; clinging to the last available shred of hope, as absurd as it may be, while slowly sinking into the abyss of inevitability lest they run ashore some unlikely salvation. The last scene captures the liberating power of dreams and stories beautifully as Mudinga approaches the abandoned ship where his potential mother has made her nest far away from the pain of land.

Both Sleepwalking Land novel and film are available at Robarts Library.

Explore our Portuguese Collections. Follow these links: Books & Films


                                                                                       

INTERACTIVE NARRATIVES NEW MEDIA AND SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT

Read the Proceedings: interactiveconference.spanport.utoronto.ca

Watch Conference’s video: http://youtu.be/AotT8fhop-s



First Day – Thursday Evening – October 23rd

Media Commons Theatre Robarts Library (3rd Floor)

130 St George St, Toronto (St. George Subway Station)

18:30-19:00 Registration

19:00-19:30 Opening Remarks

19:30-20:30 Crowdsourcing Documentary Making: Social Protest, Social Media and Engagement – Greg Elmer (Ryerson University)

Special Screening: Preempting Dissent (2014, 41’)

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 Second Day – Friday – October 24th

Room 119 – Emmanuel College

75 Queens Park Crescent E, Toronto (Museum Subway Station)

10:00-10:20 Registration & Coffee

10:20-12:00 Panel 1: New Narratives and Self-Interactivity

Moderator: Hudson Moura (Chair, Organizing Committee)

Florian Hadler & Daniel Irrgang (University of Arts Berlin, Germany) – Nonlinearity, Multilinearity, Simultaneity. Notes on Epistemological Structures

Tom Van Nuenen (Tilburg University, The Nederlands) – Journey as a post-literary travel tale.

Kris Fallon (UC Davis, USA) – Streams of the Self: The Instagram Feed as Narrative Autobiography

Siobhan O’Flynn (University of Toronto) – Narrative Strategies and Participatory Design: Framing New Methodologies for Narrative Studies

12:10-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:20 Panel 2: Social and Interactive Multimedia Projects

Moderator: Martin Zeilinger (OCAD University, Canada)

Heidi Rae Cooley & Duncan Buell (University of South Carolina, USA) – From Ghosts of the Horseshoe to Ward One: Critical Interactives for Inviting Social Engagement with Instances of Historical Erasure (Columbia, South Carolina)

Rafael Antunes (Universidade Lusófona, Portugal) – Blue Pencil: Experiences in Transmedia

Mariana Ciancia, Francesca Piredda & Simona Venditti (Politecnico di Milano, Italy) – Shaping and Sharing Imagination: Designers and the transformative power of stories.

Coffee Break (20’)

15:40-17:00 Panel 3: Documentary and Social Interactivity

Moderator: Robert Davidson (U. of Toronto, Canada)

Ben Lenzner (University of Waikato, New Zealand) – Emerging Forms of Citizen Video Activism: Challenges in Documentary Storytelling & Sustainability

Begoña Gonzalez Cuesta (IE University – Madrid, Spain) – I-Docs and New Narratives: Meaning Making in Highrise

Janice Xu (Holy Family University, USA) – Telling the Stories of Left-behind Children in China: From Diary Collection to Digital Filmmaking

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Third Day – Saturday – October 25th

Room 119 – Emmanuel College

75 Queens Park Crescent E, Toronto (Museum Subway Station)

10:30-12:00 Panel 4: Remediation, Art and Activism

Moderator: Marta Marín-Dòmine (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada)

Benj Gerdes (Long Island University – Post, USA) – Broken Screens
(and the Publics who don’t view them)

Isabella Trindade (Ryerson University, Canada) – In-between: between the concrete and the virtual, the physical and the imaginary

Charo Lacalle (Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain) – Analysing women’s web comments on television fiction

12:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:20 Panel 5: Film and Interactive Narratives

Moderator: David Sweeney (The Glasgow School of Art, Scotland)

Sandra Lim (Ryerson University, Canada) – Xapiri: at the juncture of history, experience, and technology

Kalli Paakspuu (York University, Canada) – Off the Wall with Shchedryk

Alexandre Coronato Rodrigues & Roselita Lopes de Almeida Freitas (ESPM – São Paulo, Brazil) – Collective Authorship In Real Time

Coffee Break (20’)

15:40-17:00 Panel 6: Theatre, Multimedia and New Narratives

Moderator: Sandra Lim (Ryerson University, Canada)

David Sweeney (The Glasgow School of Art, Scotland) – Crossing Boundaries: National Theatre Live, Backstage Access and Maximum Visibility

Daisy Abbott (The Glasgow School of Art, Scotland) – Old plays, New Narratives: Fan Production of New Media Texts from Broadcast Theatre

Aida Jordão (York University, Canada) – Inês de Castro on YouTube: Re-gendered Narratives

17:00-17:20 Closing Remarks

_____________________________________________________________

Organizing Committee:

Hudson Moura (Chair) (Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese – University of Toronto)

Ricardo Sternberg (Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese – University of Toronto)

Regina Cunha (Ph.D. Candidate, Communication & Society Research Centre – CECS, Universidade do Minho, Portugal)

Cecília Queiroz (Director, BRAFFTV-Brazilian Film and TV Festival of Toronto)

Organizers:

Department of Spanish and Portuguese – University of Toronto

BRAFFTV-Brazilian Film and TV Festival of Toronto

Sponsors:

Department of Spanish and Portuguese – University of Toronto

Office of the Principal – Victoria College



Download Program – Download Program (PDF 1.5MB)