Italy’s Contemporary Cinema of Migration

In recent years, Italy has undergone a significant transformation from a country of emigrants to a nation of immigrants from all over the world. The symposium focusses on Italy’s contemporary culture and representation of migration as well as on reflecting the practices of contemporary filmmaking. It will delve into the intermedial dimension of contemporary experimental cinema, encompassing various forms such as spatial installations and art books, which circulate across different media. Additionally, it will reflect on and probe ideas concerning embodied experience, memory, the diasporic imagination, and human experience amidst political, social, and technological changes.

Simone Brioni is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Stony Brook University. He specializes in the literary and cinematic representation and self-representation of migrants, and the legacy and memory of Italian colonialism. On these topics, he wrote four documentaries: The Fourth Road (2009; with/about Kaha Mohamed Aden), Aulò (2009; with/about Ribka Sibhatu), Maka (2023; with/about Geneviève Makaping) and Beyond the Frame (2023). Publications in this area also include The Somali Within (2015), Scrivere di Islam (co-authored with Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, 2020), The Horn of Africa and Italy (co-edited with Shimelis Bonsa Gulema, 2018), and L’Italia, l’altrove (2022).

Suranga Katugampala is an Italian/Sri Lankan filmmaker who explores hybrid visual languages between fiction and documentary. After numerous short films, he made his first feature film For a Son in 2017, which tells of the fragile relationship between a Sri Lankan mother, coming to Italy to work and her teenage son. The movie has as the star of Sri Lanka’s Kaushalya Fernando and is considered by critics a milestone for the cultural and artistic recognition of the second-generation Italians. Together with fellow adventurers, Suranga founded the collective / production house, Kaiya Collective in Sri Lanka with the ambition of exploring cinematographic practices that constantly question the contemporary sense of image and sound. He develops several video-installation projects, such as A City Born From the Indian Ocean, and The Season of Great Hunts. He has just finished post-producing his new film Still Here, which will be released in 2024.

Rosa Barotsi is a lecturer at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. She is currently heading a project on filmmaking cultures at the margins of the industry in Italy and beyond (IMFilm – NextGeneration EU) and was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow with CineAF: Women’s Films in Italy 1965-2015, a project on gender inequality in the Italian film industry. Her research and curatorial work focuses on the intersections between gender and labour in film. Her monograph entitled Time and the Everyday in Contemporary Slow Cinema is forthcoming with ICI Berlin Press.

Programme

16:00 Introduction

16:15 Screening For a Son (Suranga Katugampala, 2016, 75 min)
www.katugampala.com

Followed by Q&A with film director Suranga Katugampala

18:00-18:30 Break

19:00 Discussion and Book Presentation
Crazy Fish Sing

with Suranga Katugampala and Simone Brioni
moderated by Rosa Barotsi
www.yogurtmagazine.com

With

Simone Brioni
Suranga Katugampala
Rosa Barotsi

Organized by

An ICI Event in cooperation with the Italian Council

How to Attend

• At the venue: To attend in person, please register using this form.
• No online attendance / livestream available (in-person only).

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