ÂNGELA FERREIRA

Abstract
The presentation will focus on the component of the artist's practice that is concerned with the development of metaphors and political comments based on critical investigations around films. Projects such as Hotel da Praia Grande (The State of Things), 2003, For Mozambique, 2008, Political Cameras (from the Mozambique series) 2011, Studies for Jean Rouch Monument in Mozambique 2011, SAAL Brigades, 2014, One Million Roses for Angela Davis, 2020, will serve as a starting point for reflecting on the evocative image of the idea of revolution in various contexts: the political utopias, the creative energy of the Portuguese revolution, the political and social enthusiasm of post-independence in Africa, and decoloniality.
 
Biography
Ângela Ferreira (Maputo, 1958), grew up in South Africa and obtained her MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. She lives and works in Lisbon, teaching Fine Arts at Lisbon University, where she obtained her PhD in 2016. Ferreira’s work is concerned with the ongoing impact of colonialism and post-colonialism on contemporary society, an investigation that is conducted throught in-depth research and distillation of ideias into concise and resonant forms.

She represented Portugal at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, continuing her investigations into the ways in which European modernism to adapted or failed to adapt to the realities of the African continent by tracing the history of Jean Prouvé’s’ Maison Tropicale’. Architecture also serves as a starting point for the deepening of her long research on the erasure of colonial memory and the refusal of reparation, which finds its most complex materialization in A Tendency to Forget (2015) focusing on ethnographic work of the couple Jorge and Margot Dias. Her sculptural, sound and videographic homages have continuously referenced economic, political and cultural history of the African continent.

Selected works: Dalaba: Sol d’Exile (2019); Pan African Unity Mural (2018); Remining (2017); Talk Tower for Diego Rivera (2017); Boca (2016); Wattle and Daub (2016); Hollows Tunnels, Cavities and more... (2016); A Tendency to Forget (2015); Wild Decolonization (2015); Messy Colonialism (2015); Revolutionary Traces (2014); SAAL Brigades (2014); Independance Cha Cha (2014); Entrer dans la mine (2013); Mount Mabu (2013); Stone Free (2012); Political Cameras (from Mozambique series) (2012); Collapsing Structures/ Talking Buildings (2012); Cape Sonnets (2010/2012); For Mozambique (2008).

ROS GRAY

Abstract
In one of the first cultural acts to follow independence in 1975, FRELIMO's new socialist government of Mozambique set up a National Institute of Cinema (the INC). In a country where many people had little previous experience of cinema, the INC was tasked to "deliver to the people an image of the people". This book explores how this unique culture of revolutionary filmmaking began during the armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism. Following independence, the INC began the task of decolonising the film industry, building on networks of solidarity with other socialist and non-aligned struggles. Mozambique became an epicentre for militant filmmakers from around the world and cinema played an essential role in building the new nation. Crucially, the book examines how filmmaking became a resource for resistance against Apartheid as the Cold War played out across Southern Africa during the late 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on detailed film analysis, production histories and testimonies of key participants, Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution provides a compelling account of this radical experiment in harnessing cinema to social change.

In her session, Ros Gray will be presenting Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution: Anti-Colonialism, Independence and Internationalism in Filmmaking, 1968-1991, the book in which she analyzes cinema during the Mozambican Revolution, in a pre-history of contemporary debates on decolonization, political practices of the moving image and artistic involvement with anti-colonial archives.

Biography
Ros Gray is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Arts, Critical Studies in the Art Department at Goldsmiths. Her research currently has two main trajectories. The first explores networks, aesthetics and impact of militant filmmaking, particularly in relation to liberation struggles and revolutionary movements in Mozambique, Angola, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso. This research informs her forthcoming monograph Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution: Anti-Colonialism, Independence and Internationalism in Filmmaking, 1968–1991 (James Currey, 2020).  The second focuses on artistic interventions in the fields of soil care, cultivation and decolonial ecologies more broadly.

Ros Gray is the author of numerous articles in journals including ARTMargins, The Journal of Visual Cultures, The Journal of African Cinemas and Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture and has contributed to books such as Postcommunist Film: Russian, Eastern European and World Culture; The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies; Renée Green, Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams and a three volume book published in Portuguese on the history of filmmaking in Angola, Angola – O Nascimento de uma Nação. Gray was co-editor with Kodwo Eshun of a special issue of Third Text entitled “The Militant Image: A Ciné-Geography,” and co-curated a number of related film programmes at Iniva in London and at Musée Quai de Branly in Paris.

MARIA DO CARMO PIÇARRA

Abstract
Decolonization and political awareness through the poetic gaze of Sarah Maldoror. This presentation seeks to analyze the case of a unique director, Sarah Maldoror, and her work spanning from Europe to Africa and it details her special approach to political cinema of the internationalist movement. Maldoror gained renown for not using more traditional documentary approaches and the direct cinema technique, typical of internationalist-engaged cinema, in favour of a signature poetic, aesthetic gaze. Her political work, while still focusing on the challenges of the daily anti-colonial struggle, places unique characters and their psychological challenges at the core of the action. Her work was inspired by texts by Luandino Vieira, which she adapted to film, and by her experience in the war in Guinea-Bissau. Sarah was the only among the engaged filmmakers to use fiction to depict the anti-colonial war in the former Portuguese colonies. The films she directed in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau after the countries’ independence have remained invisible. The fact that her films are almost invisible, and that the ones she made in Cape Verde and Guinea Bissau after the independence are rather unknown, makes it evident the lack of acknowledgement given to Maldoror in terms of film history and film studies. This silence is both due to the difficult balance between subjective drive and the objective coercion, which affected the work of this director, as well as to the condition of woman and director who showed African women’s political awareness and their role in the new African nations.

Biography
Maria do Carmo Piçarra holds a PhD and a master's degree in Communication Sciences from FCSH-UNL, and has done post-doctoral research (2015-2018) in Communication Sciences at CECS-U. Minho and in CFAC-U. Reading. She was assistant chairman of the Portuguese Institute of Cinema, Audiovisual and Multimedia (1998-1999), founder and co-editor (2012-2018) of ANIKI - Portuguese Journal of Moving Image and is a film critic and programmer.

Maria do Carmo Piçarra has published, among other titles and articles, “Overseas Blues. Colonial Propaganda and Censorship in the Estado Novo Cinema (2015), “Salazar goes to the movies I and II” (2006, 2011), and coordinated, with Jorge António, a trilogy Angola, “The Birth of a Nation” (2013, 2014 , 2015) and, with Teresa Castro, “(Re) Imagining African Independence. Cinema, Visual Arts and the Fall of the Portuguese Empire” (2017).

ISABEL CAPELOA GIL

Biography
Isabel Capeloa Gil (Mira, 1965) is the Rector of the Catholic University of Portugal and a Full Professor of Culture Studies at the School of Human Sciences.She studied in Lisbon (University of Lisbon), Munich (Ludwig Maximilian University) and University of Chicago and holds a PhD in German Studies from UCP.

Isabel Capeloa Gil has a special interest in researching issues of diversity and conflict and has structured her work around the exploration of the disciplinary boundaries between literature, the arts and other disciplines.

She was a founding member and is a senior researcher at the Research Centre for Communication and Culture (CECC), where she coordinates the research group Culture, Art and Conflict (CAC). As an international scholar, Prof. Gil has held numerous visiting professorships at prestigious universities such as LMU University, Munich, Hamburg University, Ca’Foscari University, Venice, the Houston School of Film at the National University of Ireland, PUC Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), and USJ (Macao). She was a Visiting Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Berlin) and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (U. Stanford). Amongst her honours are a Fulbright Fellowship, and DAAD, FLAD and Gulbenkian Scholarships.

Isabel Capeloa Gil has been a regular consultant for research foundations such as the Danish Research Council, FAPESP (Brazil), the FCT and FLAD in Portugal as well as the Luso-American Commission (Fulbright). She was an evaluator of the prestigious Excellence Initiative of the German Federal Government and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and is Chair of the Humanities panel at the Danish Research Council. Furthermore, is the Honorary Fellow at the IGRS, School of Advanced Studies, University of London. In 2018, she became Chair of the Research Leadership Forum of the Global Federation of Competitiveness Councils.

JUNE GIVANNI

Abstract
Revolution and Decolonisation: Narratives from the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive “We Revolt simply because for many reasons we can no longer breathe”, Frantz Fanon. Revolution and cinema, Pan African cinema, Third Cinema, all embrace ideas and philosophies around Decolonisation to permit freedom of thought and of action in a new postcolonial direction. The latter is a fundamental canon by the Martiniquan philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) that links all of the above and as such Is one of the key overarching narratives in the JGPACA. These three narratives interconnect, are interdependent and are demonstrated in the field of African and African diaspora cinema – including Black British Cinema, Caribbean Cinema and African American Cinema.

Biography
June Givanni is a Guyanese-born London-based film curator. She has specialized in African-related movies since 1985. She is a pioneering international film curator and is regarded as a resource for African and African diaspora cinema. She runs the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive (JGPACA) in London, a personal collection of films, ephemera, manuscripts, publications, audio, photography, posters documenting pan-African cinema, whose motivation  is to make this valuable heritage collection as widely accessible as possible.

She was co-ordinator of the Greater London Council's Third Eye Film Festival in 1983, and during the 1980s was active in working for the creation of specialist distribution circuits for the work of black and Third World filmmakers. At the British Film Institute she created and was responsible for managing the African Caribbean Unit, and she compiled the first comprehensive directory of black and Asian films in the UK, as well as starting the BFI's Black Film Bulletin (1993–96). She has worked with various international film festivals programming African and African diaspora films as a guest curator.

Her publications include the edited volumes Remote Control: Dilemmas of Black Intervention in British Film and TV (1996) and Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image (2001).

BILLY WOODBERRY

Biography
Billy Woodberry is one of the leading members of the L.A. Rebellion, a film movement of the new generation of young African and African-American filmmakers who studied at the UCLA Film School in the late-1960s to the late-1980s and have created a quality Black Cinema that provided an alternative to the classical forms of Hollywood cinema, influenced by Italian neo-realism and the work of Third Cinema filmmakers. He is best known for directing the 1984 feature film, Bless Their Little Hearts (1984), which was honored at the Berlin International Film Festival. In Story of Africa, a 2015 single-channel video installation, 32 min he has enlivened a rarely seen photographic archive through the tragic tale of Calipalula, the Cuamato nobleman essential to the unfolding of events in a Portuguese "pacification campaign" of effective occupation of the territory, following the 1884–85 Berlin Conference resolution on the partition of Africa.