Professor Laura Rascaroli invited to attend Vilnius International Film Festival as Keynote Speaker for “Personal Perspective and Essayistic Form in Non-Fiction Film and Art” conference.

13 Sep 2023

Cultural, social, and historical phenomena, reflected in documentary film

On September 22 nd –23 rd , an international conference “Personal Perspective and Essayistic Form in Non-Fiction Film and Art” will take place at the film and media space Planeta (A. Goštauto str. 2, Vilnius), as a part of the Vilnius Documentary Film Festival. During the conference, researchers from 15 countries will delve into personal perspective and essayistic film form, favored by many filmmakers and artists. According to the event’s organizer, dr. Renata Šukaitytė, “since the 2000s, more and more discussions have revolved around the ‘emotional’ and ‘personal’ turn in the culture of non-fiction film and media – the turn that has allowed to overcome the traditional juxtaposition of emotion and knowledge, and also encouraged to experiment with aesthetic, rhetorical, and narrative means of expression in documentary film. Essay films allow filmmakers to develop an intimate connection with their audiences and express complex, painful, moving matters in an aesthetically, emotionally, and intellectually powerful manner”. Keynote speeches in the conference will be given by dr. Laura Rascaroli, Professor at University College Cork and the author of books “The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film” (2009) and “How the Essay Film Thinks” (2017), and dr. Audrius Stonys, filmmaker and Professor of Film Directing at Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, and a recipient of the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts. Rascaroli will introduce to the audiences the stylo-caméra and cinécriture techniques of the prominent South African artist Penny Siopis; Stonys will explain how to see what is not seen in creative documentary. During the event, guests will have an opportunity to get acquainted with lesser-known phenomena, such as diary-like, intimate Galician cinema; Cuban revolutionary documentary film; Slovakian documentaries on themes of ecology; personal VR films, and others. The conference will be accompanied by the essay film program, curated by film researchers dr. Renata Šukaitytė and Zane Balčus.