Katalin Halász
PhD in Visual Sociology
Breaking with Humanity?
Double film screening and panel discussion
19 April 2024
The Castle Cinema
THE BELL RINGS is a sweeping, untold story of bodies and emotions surfacing and submerging in a crowd gathered at the 2023 Tusványos Festival, the annual nationalist gathering of the Hungarian government in Romania. Un/Consciously, the festival goers absorb the ethnonationalist politics and gender war of Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary. It explores the lived experience of national belonging and the potentials of resistance against whiteness as global coloniality, ethnonationalism and far right ideologies. These themes are also at the heart of A FATHER A SON AND SANKARA, a feature-length documentary on connection, care, and community as sites of struggle against racial capitalism and attendant forms of oppression it depends upon.
Moderated by:
Dr Shona Hunter is a Reader at Leeds Beckett University and founder of the public intellectual project White Spaces. Her scholarly interests are framed through an engagement with feminist anti-racist decolonial critique on the social, cultural and emotional politics of the state. Her books include Power, Politics and the Emotions: Impossible Governance (2015) and The Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness (2021) co-edited with Christi van der Westhuizen.
Speakers:
Dr Szilvi Naray is an academic, drama translator and a theatre maker. She regularly publishes on feminist translation and is the Artistic Director of the theatre company, Ignition Stage. Her new book Plays from Contemporary Hungary: 'Difficult Women' and Resistant Dramatic Voices (2024) is a unique and well overdue collection of five translated contemporary plays from the illiberal democracy of Hungary offering a microcosmic lens for understanding the paradox that today’s Hungary exemplifies. Together, the plays share stories of powerful women and explore what it means to be a family unit, all the while pushing against Hungary's dominant hegemony.
Ashwani Sharma is a Lecturer on film and screen studies at the London College of Communication, UAL. Ashwani writes and performs poetry, and DJs. He has worked in the BBC and independent film in sound and has been an aeronautical engineer. His research interests include race and audio-visual culture, postcolonial and black cultural theory, diasporic and global film and contemporary art, digital media and archives, urban culture and music, racial capitalism and ecology. Ashwani is completing a book on racial capitalism, globalisation and visual culture and is a founding co-editor of darkmatter journal, and the co-editor of Disorienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Music (Zed Books).
Dr Syed Haider is a Lecturer in World Cinemas at the University of East Anglia. Syed has published on Muslim representation in Indian cinema through a postcolonial lens; the role and uses of the 'Muslim terrorist' in Hindi cinema to frame and position a nationalist narrative of a globalised/ing India; and the deployment of Sufi aesthetics for the construction of Islam in Bollywood. These publications feed into his broader research project on the possibility of cinematic experience to facilitate and engender aesthetic identities and the intersection between the somatic and the semiotic. Syed has recently curated A Day of Palestinian Cinema and Poetry in memory of Refaat Alareer and all those affected by the events in the Middle East.
Q&A with the directors:
Andreas Landeck is an award-winning filmmaker and audio-visual media producer. A FATHER A SON AND SANKARA (2023) is his second feature-length documentary. Andreas has been making films in Germany and France for over twenty years, working primarily in documentary.