Note: If you will be attending the reception immediately following the talk, please RSVP by Thursday, October 6 to the new CFS Coordinator, Nova Smith, at nova@uchicago.edu.
Please join us for the opening night of the 2011-2012 Chicago Film Seminar on Thursday, October 13 at 6:30 PM. Hamid Naficy, Professor of Radio-Television-Film and the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in Communication at Northwestern University, will give a talk entitled, "Early Iranian Cinema's Production Mode." Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, Professor of Film and Video at Columbia College, will deliver the response. This presentation coincides with the 22nd Annual Festival of Films from Iran at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
The talk will be held in Rubloff 180 (375 Chicago Avenue) at the Northwestern University Law School, between East Chicago Avenue and East Superior Street, just west of Lake Shore Drive. A reception with light fare will follow in Levy Mayer 117 Lowden Hall (357 Chicago Avenue). A map can be found here.
Hamid Naficy, a leading authority on cinema and television in the Middle East, has produced many educational films and experimental videos and has published extensively about theories of exile and displacement, exilic and diaspora cinema and media, and Iranian and Third World cinemas. His many publications include An Accented Cinema, The Making of Exile Cultures, Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged, Iran Media Index, and the AFI anthology, Home, Exile, Homeland. His recent honors include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council. 2011 marks the publication of Volumes 1 and 2 of his monumental 4-volume Social History of Iranian Cinema, published by Duke University Press.
Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa has an M.F.A. from University of Illinois at Chicago. She has been teaching as a full time faculty at the Film and Video Department since 1989. Her areas of expertise are cinema studies (international cinema, Middle Eastern cinema, Exilic cinema, women, gender, race in cinema), documentary film theory and production and alternative forms. She has lectured and written extensively on Iranian cinema. Her book on Abbas Kiarostami, co-written with Jonathan Rosenbaum, was published by the University of Illinois Press in March 2003, and her films A Tajik Woman, Saless far from Home, and Ruins Within have been shown in many international film festivals. Her recent film A Different Moon was shown in several European film festivals in 2009 and has been picked up for distribution by European Spiritual Film Festival in France. She is currently working a on a personal documentary film about her relationship with Jerry Lewis’s cinema.
On behalf of the Chicago Film Seminar Organizing Committee, we look forward to seeing you there.
