Newsletter no. 3 — November 2023

Au-delà des frontières

On 8 November, we launched a new series of screenings and conferences at the Université de Montréal, in collaboration with the Groupe de recherche sur l’avènement et la formation des identités médiatiques (GRAFIM). This series seeks to create a space for thinking about and discussing themes of equity, decoloniality and accessibility, seen from the perspective of cinema studies.

The next screening will be held on 28 November. We will be showing two films by Nour Ouayda, One Sea 10 Seas (2019) and The Secret Garden (2023), followed by a discussion with the filmmaker moderated by professor André Habib. The next events will be on 21 March and 2 April 2024. For more details, consult the program (in French only) on our website.

L’espace des plateformes

The exhibition L’espace des plateformes, co-presented by cinEXmedia at the Université de Montréal since 21 September, remains open to the public until 8 December. This initiative arose out of the vast multidisciplinary project “Platforms and Uses” including a conference of the same name held from 2 to 4 November.

L’espace des plateformes encourages visitors to explore artists’ creative practices alongside certain specific uses within the private sphere of contemporary digital platforms. The exhibition makes it possible to think about the power dynamics and inequalities still present with respect to access to digital media, and about the deleterious effects of our unbridled consumption and irresponsible use of equipment with a limited lifespan.

To learn more, read the review of the vernissage by our research assistant Lou Andrysiak. In an upcoming newsletter we will also publish an article on the “Platforms and Uses” conference.

The cinEXmedia partnership is supporting the research projects of two researchers working on cinema’s accessibility and therapeutic benefits.

The post-doctoral researcher Romina Soledad Romay (see photo) has recently received a grant from the Centre de recherche de l’Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal (CRIUGM) and from cinEXmedia to help carry out her post-doctoral research-creation project, an immersive installation inspired by Impressionist art and the acoustic world of botanical gardens.

For her part, the doctoral candidate Lisa Mélinand has obtained the support of cinEXmedia for her project of creating an inclusive, accessible and ecological streaming platform on which members of the public can find films with therapeutic benefits.

Our research assistants Hugo Samson and Lou Andrysiak interviewed these two scholars. Read their articles on our website, hyperlinked above, to find out more about their projects.

Kinorino's Kino Night

The first evening of kino-type screenings of the Kinorino student film festival, supported by cinEXmedia, was held on 28 September at Ausgang Plaza. You can read Lou Andrysiak’s review on our site.

International Conference on Teaching Cinema

On 29 and 30 September we organised, at the Université de Montréal, the international conference “Opening Dialogue: Variations on Image Education” (website in French only), in collaboration with Laboratoire CinéMédias and the I/MA/C/S (International Master in Cinema Studies) network. You can read the report by William Pedneault-Pouliot on the opening lecture, by the scholar André Gaudreault, on our site.

Roundtable at the FNC

On 13 October, as part of the Festival du nouveau cinéma de Montréal (FNC), we presented the event “Le cerveau fait son cinéma,” consisting in a screening of the film Samsara (2023), by Lois Patiño, and a panel discussion on slow cinema and its effects on the brain, moderated by the executive director of cinEXmedia, Santiago Hidalgo. Hugo Samson’s report on the event can be found on our site.

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