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This conference seeks to explore the representation and conceptualization of interior space in cinema, in the context of the transnational relations and identities that inform both spaces and the films that project them. The conference will examine the idea that the intimate architectures of homes and dwelling places, whether of a transitory or more rooted nature, both shape and are shaped by the identities of those that inhabit them.
Presenting his films at the conference will be the highly-acclaimed Portuguese director Pedro Costa, who, in films such as In Vanda’s Room (2000), takes us into dark, squalid rooms of immigrants in the slums of Lisbon. The austere beauty of his films navigates between intimacy and distance. A major concern of the conference will be the co-extensiveness – or otherwise – of interior scenes and psychic interiority.
However, the interior will be seen not as a purely discrete or withdrawn ‘personal’ domain, but as informed and sometimes disrupted by the political experience of space at large. In crossing intimate thresholds, what do films reveal about those wider, geopolitical boundaries and transnational forces that inevitably come to bear upon our private existences?
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