2021 Seminar - Opacity

Opacity

The 66th Flaherty Film Seminar
July 9–18, 2021

Programmed by Janaína Oliveira

ONLINE

Uncertainty, fragmentation, opacity. We live in a time when the transparency of convictions and definitions and the desire for total understanding of differences that historically guided the Western world of images no longer holds. In cinema, the boundaries between center and margin have been loosened and dissolved. Today, the critical issue may no longer be to relocate the center but our perceptions of the margins. More than ever, the traditional geographical boundaries of cinemas have proven unsatisfactory, as cultural and historical connections are continually reworked. Moving images require both filmmakers and viewers to negotiate what is not understood: there is no such thing as a blind spot; there never was. The spots are opaque, and they compel us to shape new tools for describing what we see, feel, and think.

The 66th edition of the Flaherty Film Seminar will inspire us to look defiantly at the opaque places of cinema. As suggested by the writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the works presented will “clamor for the rights to opacity for everyone” in their irreducible singularities. Opacity is an unfolding force that creates openings and endless possibilities of cinematic existence, especially for subjects that have been excluded or are less valued on conventional screens. The Seminar will be an opportunity to experience the moving image in its power, beauty, and, most of all, ordinariness. As an invitation for displacement or provocation, it points to an open future, to cultural, formal, aesthetic freedoms, where questioning is prioritized over finding answers.

Due to the current Covid-19 health crisis, this year’s Seminar will be the first virtual iteration of the Flaherty. While we will miss being with new and old friends in person, this Seminar is an opportunity to gather the largest and most diverse Flaherty cohort to date. We will engage in the way we have for over sixty years, with screenings and structured and informal discussions, and also convene new activities that expand the possibilities of the moment... True to the inventive spirit of the Flaherty, the sessions will be led by participating artists to stimulate our minds, our senses, and our collective unconscious.

Janaína Oliveira
2021 Flaherty Seminar Programmer

Janaína Oliveira has a Ph.D. in History and is a professor at the Federal Institute of Rio de Janeiro (IFRJ) and was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Center for African Studies at Howard University, in Washington D.C. Since 2009, she does research focused on Black and African Cinemas.
She is the head programmer of the Zózimo Bulbul Black Film Festival in Rio de Janeiro, part of the programming committee of the FINCAR, International Women Filmmakers Festival in Recife, and also worked as an advisor for African and black diaspora films for the Locarno Film Festival, in Switzerland (2019-2020).
In 2019 she programmed the “Soul in the eye: Zózimo Bulbil legacies and the contemporary Black Brazilian Cinema” series at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. She is the founder of the Black Cinema Itinerant Forum (FICINE).