What a great year we've had

The department was very pleased to be given the green light to build a brand new, ultra-accessible, multi-million pound cinema and gallery space. The cinema is called ‘Bloc’ and is currently under construction. It will be at the heart of the Film Studies programme from 2022-23.

Dr Ashvin Devasandarum has been awarded funding by the British Academy for Confronting Urban Violence: Brazil/India Networking Workshops. He has been contracted by Routledge to write Indian Indies: A Guide to New Independent Indian Cinema, for their Focus series. He directed the BFI-supported Young Curators Lab in Feb 2020 as part of the UK Asian Film Festival.

Professor Sue Harris is Co-Investigator on the ERC Advanced Grant STUDIOTEC: Film Studios: Infrastructure, Culture, Innovation in Britain, France, Germany and Italy, 1930-60. She is currently organising the first international virtual workshop on the theme of 'Studio Architecture' for September 2020.

Dr Mario Slugan’s paperback edition of Noël Carroll and Film A Philosophy of Art and Popular Culture (Bloomsbury) was published in July 2020, along with the paperback edition of Fiction and Imagination in Early Cinema: A Philosophical Approach to Film History (Bloomsbury).

Dr Slugan also co-organized the conference Documentaries and the Non/Fiction Divide, Queen Mary University of London, UK, Nov 15-16, 2019. He has received the British Society for Aesthetics Synergy Conference Grant (with Enrico Terrone), 2020 and the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences Large Grant Seed Fund, 2019. Mario recently became a Fellow of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image.

Dr Sasha Litvintseva’s film A Demonstration (2020) premiered in competition at the prestigious Berlinale Film Festival February 2020.

Dr Annette Kuhn and Dr Guy Westwell's The second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Film Studies was published in June

Lucy Bolton has secured the prestigious AHRC REACH consortium Collaborative Doctoral Studentship with the BFI: Creating, Exporting and Exhibiting British Film Stardom, 1920 – 1970 (beginning October 2020).

Dr Yasmin Fedda’s new film Ayouni premiered at CPH:Dox 2020 and is now available online directly through the film's website: www.AyouniFilm.com. The film’s launch was supported by The Syria Campaign, Amnesty International UK and Nophotozone. Ayouni is available in all languages key to the international discussions relating to Syria (English, Arabic, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Russian), and it is free to view in the MENA region.

A reading of The Leading Man by Eugene Doyen was supported by the department as a part of Queen Mary's LGBT+ History Month 2020. Set in the 1950's British Film industry the play portrays the criminal stigmatisation and prejudices against same sex relationships before the change in legislation in 1967.

Athena Mandis’ feature film project Xenos was selected for the 2019 Torino Development Lab, supported by Screenskills and British Council. In 2019 her short film From Camden to Enfield, A Cypriot Migration Story was made with University of Westminster support. Her short film, Losing Grace is currently in post-production.

Dr Kiki Yu produced the feature documentary The Two Lives of Li Ermao which premiered at IDFA 2019. Kiki Yu was nominated by the university to apply for a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. (Only 2 nominations are allowed per institution). Her project is entitled: Cinema and Daoism: Aesthetics, Ethics and Practices of ‘Nature-Human-Oneness’

Dr Libby Saxton and Dr Anat Pick co-edited the special journal issue 'Religion in Contemporary Thought and Film', Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, 42: 3 (November 2019), which has also been published as a book by Edinburgh University Press.

Dr Alasdair King, along with colleagues from School of English and Drama, was awarded LAHP funding for 2019-2020 for the series of interdisciplinary PhD training events CAPITAL FORMS, that consisted of reading seminars and a day symposium.

Professor Janet Harbord’s article 'The autistic gesture: film as neurological training' was published in the NECSUS journal 'Gesture' special Edition December 2019. In October 2019 Professor Harbord and Research Fellow Bonnie Evans ran a workshop with collaborator Project Artworks (Jarman Award nominee 2020) as a part of Autism through Cinema (Wellcome funded). Janet cocurated the Barbican season Autism & Cinema: an exploration of neurodiversity (April 2020, postponed to November 2020).

Dr Annette Kuhn’s research project Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive: 1930s Britain and Beyond received funding from the AHRC (2019-2022). The project is in conjunction with the Universities of Lancaster and Glasgow. Annette’s recent publications include ‘Annie Hall and the invention of film studies’, in Remembering Annie Hall. London: Bloomsbury (in Press); (with Guy Westwell) ‘What film studies is: mapping the discipline’, in Cinematic Thinking. London: Bloomsbury (in Press); (with Guy Westwell) The Oxford Dictionary of Film Studies. Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 2020; Ratcatcher. BFI Film Classics. London: Palgrave MacMillan, new edition 2020.

Professor Steven Eastwood received funding from the BFI/Doc Society for his forthcoming feature film Neurocultures, and from the Film London FLAMIN artists’ moving image scheme, for his planned multiscreen gallery installation Stim Cinema, both of which are a part of Autism through Cinema, supported by Wellcome Trust.

In December Professor Eastwood organised the workshop Autism through Cinema: Screen Dynamics, in collaboration with The Autism Research Centre (City University). He also launched the Representations of Autism online workshop in July 2020. His previous feature film ISLAND (2018) was released on VOD in November 2019. The ISLAND educational toolkit was launched the same month and licensed to national NHS trusts, hospices and university libraries.