UI symposium looks at Afro-Brazilian cinema and Black diaspora

IOWA CITY — Taking Brazil’s new Black cinema as its point of departure, “Frequencias: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora” brings together filmmakers, artists, scholars and critics from across the globe to inaugurate a practice of collective attunement.

This three-day University of Iowa’s Obermann Humanities Symposium will be held March 30 to April 1 at various Iowa City sites, including FilmScene, the UI Stanley Museum of Art and the Becker Communication Studies Building. All events are free and open to the public.

Janaina Oliveira, from the Federal Instituto of Rio de Janeiro, will deliver the keynote lecture at 3:15 p.m. March 30 at FilmScene in the Chauncey, Theater 2, 404 E. College St.

Among the questions to be explored: How can we best attune ourselves to the waves set in motion by this new cinema? How does Brazil’s current Black cinema resonate within contemporary aesthetic practices of the Black diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, North America and Europe? In what ways do these new formations of global cinemas refract our understanding of the post-colonial and of diaspora?

Organized by Christopher Harris, UI Cinematic Arts professor, with partnership from Brazilian film scholar, programmer and teacher Janaina Oliveira and contemporary Brazilian literature and culture scholar Cristiane Lira from the University of Georgia, this symposium will feature the emerging wave of young Afro-Brazilian filmmakers, curators, programmers, and scholars whose art and scholarship have already had an impact on the international cinema.

Harris said the events "are aimed at the generation of new knowledge regarding the central question of how Black identity is figured in the new Afro-Brazilian cinema and how that resonates with Black cinema globally."

For details, go to obermann.uiowa.edu/frequencias