Dr Humberto Saldanha – “Screening Cosmopolitanism Otherwise: The Cosmopolitan Animal and Non-human Aesthetic in It Is Night in America”, Tue 17th @3pm

This talk argues that It Is Night in America (É Noite na América, 2022), by Brazilian visual artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz, theorises a renewed understanding of cosmopolitanism by expanding it to include animals.

While cosmopolitanism has often been extended to the non-human through models of interspecies conviviality or the attribution of political rights, this paper contends that It Is Night in America shifts the emphasis towards how animals produce and shape cosmopolitanism. To address this point, the talk investigates how the film engages with a sensorial aesthetic to foreground animals’ affective and precarious ways of being in the world and relate to others. The paper contends that, through this aesthetic, It Is Night in America turns cinema into a non-human cosmopolitan medium where animals reclaim space and nurture modes of interspecies cohabitation that challenge Brazilian modernity and its historical intersection with environmental issues.

HUMBERTO SALDANHA is Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests include cinema and cosmopolitanism, world cinema theories, film and the domestic space, and Brazilian and Latin American cinemas. His publications include “Moving Out to Come Out and Feel at Home: Queer Cosmopolitanism in Karim Aïnouz’s Futuro Beach” (forthcoming in the New Review of Film and Television Studies) and “Magic Realism as a Cosmopolitan Borderland: Expanding Reality through Sound, Affect and Indigenous Cosmologies in The Fever” (New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film). He is currently developing a monograph provisionally titled Cosmopolitan Brazilian Cinema: Encountering Human and Non-Human Worlds.

Tuesday 17/02/2026, 3–5 p.m., Film and Screen Media Auditorium, Kane Building B10B (Basement)