When: 15 October 2021, 18:00 — 19:30Venue: Online Book your place SCREENING + Discussion Les Sauteurs (2016), directed by Abou Bakar Sidibé, Moritz Siebert and Estephan Wagner. ‘Fifth Cinema’: Theorising Refugee-Led Filmmaking, with Raminder Kaur and Mariagiulia Grassilli. Raminder Kaur and Mariagiulia Gassilli describe ‘Fifth Cinema’ as: ‘a mobile, unstable, instantaneous, fragmented, displaced and hybrid bricolage. A “smart cinema ..read more

How can you use archival film to inspire and inform new stories? The Make Film History project opens up access to 200 archive films from the BBC Archive, BFI National Archive, Irish Film Institute and Northern Ireland Screen for creative reinterpretation by aspiring filmmakers. In association with Birkbeck’s Essay Film Festival, the Make Film History ..read more

by Biya Shadab On Friday, 13 November, 2020, Bertha DocHouse and the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) co-presented the Palestinian documentary Frontiers of Dreams and Fears (2001), an ideal introduction to the beautiful, meticulous works of Mai Masri, one of Palestine’s most distinguished filmmakers. This screening marked the launch of a book on ..read more

Video recordings of the event “Remembering Channel 4’s Out on Tuesday: Queer Spaces in Public Service Television”, November 2019 2019 saw the 30th anniversary of the inaugural transmission by the UK’s Channel Four Television Corporation of the world’s first public service, free-to air broadcast television series aimed at what was defined at the time as a ..read more

A 16mm projection of a documentary about Guyana’s anti-colonial struggles, an anecdote about footage from that film being smuggled in a cricketer’s kit bag, and the film’s score played live on the flute—these were a few of the highlights a packed Birkbeck Cinema experienced at a presentation of the films of the Victor Jara Collective ..read more

On February 20, 2020, Interim Director of Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, Professor Catherine Grant, gave an invited talk at the University of Pittsburgh, in its Film and Media Colloquium series. Talk Abstract According to Mikhail Iampolski, intertextuality is a helpful concept for understanding processes by which allusions to other films or texts are ..read more

Last June a call for papers went round the School of Arts from the Birkbeck Institute of Moving Image (BIMI) for Pittsburgh University’s annual Film and Media Studies Graduate Conference, taking place the following September. The theme of this year’s conference was Limits of Cinema/Cinema Unlimited? and of the suggested topics what stood out to ..read more

We are very happy to publish recordings of the five sessions that comprised the BIMI/Corkscrew: Birkbeck Practice-Research Doctoral Training Group event Repetition and Variation: Video Essays as Comparative Film and Television Studies Methodologies that took place on October 12, 2019. Part One features Catherine Grant (Birkbeck) delivering an introduction to the event Part Two features a ..read more

Summary Yugoslav-Serbian filmmaker Zelimir Zilnik is one of the genuine legends of European cinema. Since his auspicious debut in 1969 with the film Early Works, which was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, the enfant terrible of Yugoslav New Film has created an impressive body of work, remaining committed to his ..read more

Everyone at Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image was very shocked and saddened to hear the news that Professor Thomas Elsaesser had unexpectedly passed away on December 4 while visiting China as part of his guest professorship in Beijing. Most of us involved in BIMI and the Essay Film Festival team had known Thomas for ..read more