Opening Event
The festival opens with a lecture by special guest Laura Rascaroli, whose influential books The Personal Camera (2009) and How the Essay Film Thinks (2017) have shaped contemporary understandings of the essay film. In her lecture, Rascaroli will explore the historical and aesthetic continuities within the genre and reflect on notable examples of contemporary essay filmmaking.
The film Laura Rascaroli has selected for a full screening is Undead Voices (Switzerland, 2019–2021), directed by Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo. This 36-minute essay film breathes new life into a damaged amateur documentary from 1975, rediscovering suppressed female voices from Italy’s radical movements.
We are honoured to open the festival with a lecture by our main guest Laura Rascaroli (University College Cork), whose seminal books The Personal Camera (2009) and How the Essay Film Thinks (2017) have shaped contemporary understanding of the essay film. In her talk, Rascaroli will reflect on the historical and aesthetic continuities of the genre, with reference to and fragments of many notable essay "films.
Undead Voices (2019–2021) explores the remnants of 1970s Italian feminist activism through a decaying Super 8 film. Blending archival fragments, personal memory, and sound collaborations, it reimagines how lost histories can speak.
