Co-sponsored by BAMPFA, the Arts Research Center, and UCHRI.
Susana de Sousa Dias continues her exploration of Portugal’s tragic past in Luz obscura, a moving experimental essay film on political imprisonment, government oppression, and the families left behind in their wake. The film screening is preceded by the fourth annual Les Blank Lecture, presented by Sousa Dias.
Susana de Sousa Dias is an award-winning Portuguese independent filmmaker. One of the most prominent aspects of her work is the artistic integration of archival footage dating from the Portuguese dictatorship (1926-1974). In 2014 she received a Ph.D. in Fine-Arts Video from the University of Lisbon, with a thesis on Archive footage and Decelerated Movement, a theoretical work that accompanied the making of her second long feature essay documentary. She is co-founder of the production company Kintop where she works as director and editing consultant. She teaches New Media at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon and is an author of diverse essays on cinema, mainly dealing with subjects related to her own work.
ARC’s 2018-19 program is a collaboration between ARC Interim Director Natalia Brizuela (Film & Media and Spanish & Portuguese), Tarek Elhaik (Anthropology, UC Davis), Anneka Lenssen (History of Art), Leigh Raiford (African American Studies), and Poulomi Saha (English), supported by a generous grant from the The University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI).
This project was supported in part by the University of California Office of the President MRPI funding MR-15-328710.
