Richard Peña is a Professor Emeritus of Film and Media Studies at Columbia University in the United States. He will be at the Escola das Artes to conduct a masterclass on the Sensory Ethnography Lab. This event is organised in partnership with DocLisboa - International Film Festival.

Approaching the Other: Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab and Leviathan

Members of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel have created a unique anthropological excavation, this time set in one of the world's most dangerous professions: the commercial fishing industry. Taking us to the high seas of the North Atlantic - Herman Melville territory - the filmmakers capture this cruel and unforgiving world in all its visceral, frightening and cosmic detail, using an arsenal of cameras that pass freely from film crew to ship's crew and fly from below sea level to literal bird's eye views. The result is a hallucinatory sensory experience quite unlike any other. To paraphrase Francis Ford Coppola describing his Apocalypse Now, Leviathan is not a film about commercial fishing; it is commercial fishing.

Richard Peña
Emeritus professor of film and media studies at Columbia University, specialised in film theory and international cinema. Was the programme director of the Film at Lincoln Center, and the director of the New York FF. Organised retrospectives and film series devoted to the world’s cinema. Visiting professor at Princeton, Harvard and La Sorbonne. Also taught at the universities of Beijing, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and at the Gedai Art Institute (Tokyo).