The light, the lives, and the textures of contemporary, working-class Mumbai are explored and celebrated by writer/director Payal Kapadia, who won the Grand Prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival for her revelatory fiction feature debut.

Centering on two roommates who also work together in a city hospital -- head nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and recent hire Anu (Divya Prabha) --plus their coworker, cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), Kapadia's film alights on moments of connection and heartache, hope and disappointment. Prabha, her husband from an arranged marriage living in faraway Germany, is courted by a doctor at her hospital; Anu carries on a romance with a Muslim man, which she must keep a secret from her strict Hindu family; Parvaty finds herself dealing with a sudden eviction from her apartment. Kapadia captures the bustle of the metropolis and the open-air tranquility of a seaside village with equal radiance, articulated by her superb actresses and by the camera with a lyrical naturalism that occasionally drifts into dreamlike incandescence.

All We Imagine as Light is a soulful study of the transformative power of friendship and sisterhood, in all its complexities and richness.

Part of our "New Visions, New Voices" series. Courtesy of Variance Films. In Malayalam, Hindi, with English subtitles.

Sasha is a young vampire with a very serious problem: she's too sensitive to kill! Frustrated by their daughter's empathy for humans, Sasha's parents decide to cut off her blood supply to force her to learn how to huntÉ or starve! Just as she decides to reject her vampire instincts and embrace a final death, she meets a lonely teenager named Paul who is willing to give his life to save hers, on the condition that she help to fulfill his final wishes before day breaks.

Part of our "Nosferatu Afterlives" series. Courtesy of Drafthouse Films. In French with English subtitles.

Widely considered the most important film in the history of Ukranian cinema, Sergei Parajanov's Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors is a masterwork that boldly combines folkloric pageantry, fairy tale mysticism, and frenetic, hallucinatory cinematography.

Adapted from Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky's novel, Shadows tells the story of Ivan (Ivan Mykolaichuk), a young Hutsul peasant who witnesses his father's murder by the local miser. Years later, Ivan falls in love with the miser's daughter, Marichka (Larisa Kadochnikova), but her shocking death leaves him wallowing in grief until he meets Palahna (Tatyana Bestayeva), a beautiful woman who seems to restore his faith in life and hope for the future. When the ghost of Marichka begins to haunt Ivan, however, Palahna is driven into the arms of the local sorcerer (Spartak Bagashvili), with tragic results.

Shadows is steeped in the earthy atmosphere of the Carpathian mountains; filmed by Parajanov and cinematographer Yuri Ilyenko with an eye for constantly innovative camera movements and vivid color; and suffused by Hutsul culture in the form of composer Myroslav Skoryk's collage-like score, which brings together Ukrainian folk melodies with modernist, experimental orchestration. It is one of cinema's singular productions, capturing the spiritual majesty of the past by creatively forging the medium's future.

The film screens in 4K restoration by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in collaboration with the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre and in association with the Dovzhenko Film Studio. Special thanks to Daniel Bird and _ukasz Ceranka. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Part of our "Restorations & Rediscoveries" series. Courtesy of Janus Films. In Ukrainian with English subtitles.

Winner of the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the prestigious André Bazin Prize from Cahiers du Cinema, both celebrating outstanding feature debuts, this enthralling work from Vietnamese filmmaker Pham Thien An is a reverie on faith, loss, and nature expressed with uncommon invention and depth.

The sudden death of his sister-in-law brings unexpected responsibilities to Thien (Le Phong Vu), who is reluctantly tasked with bringing his five-year-old nephew Dao to their countryside hometown. On the road, Thien is drawn into a search for his long-missing older brother, haunted and spurred forward by a series of sublime dreams that reignite suppressed memories, forbidden desires, and specters of his own youth. What began as a journey home becomes a pilgrimage marked by visual splendor and mystical overtones, a quest for understanding and certainty in a Vietnam that seems unable to provide any clear answers. As Thien battles with the existential question of what is worth living for, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell interrogates the persistence and complexity of faith, not only in the spiritual but in the delicate beauty of earthly existence.

Part of our "New Visions, New Voices" series. Courtesy of Kino Lorber. In Vietnamese with English subtitles.

Roland Marchal, CNRS, SciencesPo

For a longtime observer of armed conflicts in Central and Eastern Africa, it is striking that we are witnessing a higher number of conflicts than in 1991. This presentation will address several recurrent aspects. First, Marchal will address the intricacies of violence and local politics. Second, the organization of armed groups frequently does not correspond to the kind of violence they are exercising on the population. And third, paradoxically, the international community has often been unable and unwilling to frame its understanding of conflict, with the consequence that transitions to peace are becoming more problematic, while international support for conflict grows.

Hosted by Brooks Center on Global Democracy with support from the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies and the Institute for African Development.

Guadelupe Pinzón is one of Mexico’s leading maritime historians. Her work expands Mexico’s territory into both the Caribbean and the Pacific, thus offering an uncommon approach to Mexican history. In this conversation Dr. Pinzón and Ernesto Bassi will speak about how thinking of Mexico’s maritime space reframes Mexican history, as well as about the opportunities and challenges of doing maritime history from Mexican shores and the prospects of a maritime history of Latin America. Monday's conversation will be in Spanish, and Pinzón will also be giving a talk in English on Tuesday, March 4 titled "From the Atlantic to the Pacific: Interoceanic Connections through Tehuantepec and Nicaragua in the Late 18th Century."

Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos is a Doctor in History from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UNAM, where she is currently a researcher and professor at the Institute for Historical Research. Pinzón Ríos is also a member of the National System of Researchers and an advisor of the graduate program in history. She has been studying maritime port activities throughout the Pacific, especially in New Spain, and has published Acciones y reacciones en los puertos del Mar del Sur. Desarrollo portuario del Pacífico novohispano a partir de sus políticas defensivas (1713-1789) and Hombres de mar en las costas novohispanas. Trabajos, trabajadores y vida portuaria en el departamento marítimo de San Blas (siglo XVIII). She also has various published works, articles, and book chapters.

Co-sponsored by Romance Studies, Science & Technology Studies, and Society for the Humanities.

Nuclear weapons and associated technologies have been primarily developed by and for Global North nations, often using the labor and natural resources of indigenous populations around the world, and often doing violence to those populations and their environments. As a result, many scholars analyze the development of nuclear technologies–including uranium mining, the processing and production of fissile materials, nuclear weapons testing, and use–as a form of colonialism. But as a state-centric framework, colonialism does not always capture practices that transcend national boundaries; radioactivity does not respect borders. This panel will elucidate the uses and limitations of the colonial framework for understanding the social and political implications of nuclear technologies. The panel will discuss how nuclear technologies have been developed in ways that are both locally specific and globally-interconnected, and the implications of this history for social and environmental justice.

Virtual panel discussion with-

Vincent Intondi, PACS Domestic Affiliate Scholar

Myrriah Gomez, Associate Professor at University of New Mexico

Mary Mitchell, Assistant Professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers Newark

Magdalena Stawkowski, Assistant Professor at University of South Carolina

Hirokazu Miyazaki, Former Director of the Einaudi Center, Professor at Northwestern University

Register here.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Land, we are often told, is at the heart of the conflict in Israel/Palestine. But when we survey the field of Palestinian Studies, we find that scholars often treat land as an abstraction and rarely study the people who live on and from it. In this talk, I focus on a legal relationship that has complex political and social meanings for Palestinians: private property. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in the highlands of Palestine, I explain why rural Palestinians turned to private property to defend their land from settler dispossession after 1967, and how, since the mid-2000s, the formalization of property ownership across the West Bank has enabled Palestinian capital to transform agricultural land into real estate, sparking new debates over the role that property should play in anti-colonial practice and social life. I show that by foregrounding how Palestinians use, value, and importantly, own land, we can reframe Palestine as a question of land justice, and rethink what the Palestinian struggle has to teach us about the battles for land unfolding across the world today. Speaker Bio Paul Kohlbry is a socio-cultural anthropologist. His research brings together critical agrarian studies, political ecology, and legal anthropology. He has worked, studied, and carried out research in the Middle East, primarily Israel/Palestine, since 2007. His writings have been published in American Ethnologist, Antipode, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the Journal of Peasant Studies, and elsewhere. His first book, Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine, will be published next year by Stanford University Press. His next book project, tentatively entitled “Making the Desert Green: Agriculture, Technology, and Climate Change,” will be a multi-sited ethnography of the arid regions of Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Qatar, and the UAE. He has held positions at Brown University and the University of Chicago, and is currently a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. Next fall, he will be an assistant professor in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. Sponsors: Hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and its Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) initiative, with support from Near Eastern Studies. Event is both in person and virtual.

In this talk, Conan Cheong investigates the desire of eminent Lao Buddhist monks to photograph and be photographed by examining the monk portraits kept in the Buddhist Archive of Luang Prabang, Laos. The Archive, housed in a Buddhist monastery, preserves over 35,000 photographs taken and collected by monks from 1890. It was founded in 2005 by Sathu Nyai Khamchan Virachitta Maha Thela, head of the Sangha in Luang Prabang (1953-2007), and a German photographer, Hans Georg Berger.

Conan addresses monks’ photographic practices in relation to other objects collected in Buddhist temple contexts which may be described as “sacred” (Lao: sing saksit) — bone relics, Buddha images, ritual offerings, and particularly the life-sized monk portrait statues modeled naturalistically in wax, resin, or bronze.

Monks are indispensable in Buddhist ritual as the “highest field of merit (anuttaraṁ puññakkhettaṁ)”, where ritual giving (dāna) to them produces the highest level of soteriological benefit for the devotee. Drawing from his doctoral field research in Laos, Conan opens up a discussion on how the photographs of Luang Prabang monks might be seen as expressions of this meritorious giving, corresponding with Buddhological research into how the Buddha, as the quintessential monastic, is made a living presence in material things.