Haden Guest
Harvard University
Department of Visual and Environmental Studies
Director of the Harvard Film Archive / Senior Lecturer on Visual and Environmental Studies
Haden Guest is Director of the Harvard Film Archive where he curates the HFA cinematheque and its motion picture, manuscript and photographic collections. He has curated film programs for the Viennale, the Oberhausen Film Festival and the Gulbenkian Foundation and Museum in Lisbon where he organized the twelve part Cinema Dialogues: Harvard at the Gulbenkian (2013-15). Guest also oversees the Harvard Film Archive’s preservation program which focuses on independent and avant-garde cinema, but also recently preserved the previously lost Robert Flaherty film A NIGHT OF STORYTELLING, rediscovered in 2013 in Harvard’s Houghton Library. As Senior Lecturer in Harvard’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Guest teaches courses on film history and archival practice. He holds a PhD in Film History from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently writing a critical history of Portuguese cinema after the 1974 Carnation Revolution. In 2015 Guest was awarded a Medal of Cultural Merit by the Secretary of Culture of Portugal, in recognition for his work curating and researching Portuguese cinema. He was a producer of Soon-Mi Yoo’s SONGS FROM THE NORTH, winner of major prizes including a Golden Leopard at the 2014 Locarno Film Festival, the DocLisboa Prize for Best First Feature and the Jury Prize at the Buenos Aires International Film Festival.
João Mário Grilo
New University of Lisbon
Faculty of Social and Human Sciences // IFilNova
Full Professor of Communication Sciences - Cinema
Studies of Economics in Coimbra, Degree in Sociology at ISCTE in Lisbon, MA, PhD and Aggregation in Communication Sciences /Cinema in the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the New University of Lisbon, where he is, actually, a Full Professor, teaching a Film Directing seminar and coordinating the new PhD in Artistic Studies, the PhD in Digital Media and MA in Film/Television. He has published extensively on cinema and contemporary art in Portugal and abroad (namely in Traffic magazine). He is author of several books: The Order in Cinema (1997), The Lessons of Cinema (2006), The Cinema of Non-Illusion (2006), The Imagined Man (2006), The Book of Images (2007), Film & Philosophy: Mapping an Encounter (2014), a collective compendium on the subject, co-organized with Irene Aparício, which was part of the research project with the same name he directed for the Foundation of Science and Technology, between 2009 and 2012.
As a filmmaker he directed his first feature film, Maria, in 1978, followed by The Foreigner (1982), The King’s Trial (1989), The End of the World (1993), Saramago: Documents (1994), The Eyes of Asia (1996), Out of Sight (1998), 451 Forte (2000), The Break (2002), Proof of Contact (2004), The Flying Carpet (2008), Two Women (2010), Your Home (2012). Still, as a film director, he represented Portugal, among others, in the Official Selections of the Festivals of Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Locarno , Rio de Janeiro , Toronto , Vancouver , S. Francisco , Houston, Rotterdam, Biarritz, Hong Kong, Stockholm. He received, in 1982, the Prix Georges Sadoul, in 1989, the Special Jury Prize at Rio de Janeiro, the Public Prize and the Jury Prize in Biarritz, the PROCIREP Prize in Cannes, Best Documentary Prize at IndieLisboa (2012) and the Paz dos Reis Prize for the ensemble of his career in Oporto (2010).
Rachel Dwyer
SOAS, University of London
Department of the Languages and Cultures of South Asia
Professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema
Rachel Dwyer is Professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema at SOAS, University of London. She took her BA in Sanskrit at SOAS, followed by an MPhil in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford. Her PhD research at SOAS was on the Gujarati lyrics of Dayaram (1777-1852). She teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in cinema and supervises PhD research on Indian cinema.
Professor Dwyer’s main research interest is in Hindi cinema where she has researched and published on film magazines and popular fiction; consumerism and the new middle classes and the middlebrow; love and eroticism (of the wet sari and of the kiss and saying ‘I love you’); visual culture (sets, locations and costumes); religion (Hinduism and Islam); emotions (anger and happiness); Gandhi and the biopic; stars (Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Rishi Kapoor and dynastic stardom); Hinglish and language in cinema. She has written a book in the British Film Institute’s ‘World Directors’ series about one of the great figures of the Hindi film industry, Yash Chopra, with whom she has worked for several years. She later wrote the BFI’s guide to ‘100 Bollywood films’. Her most recent book is ‘Bollywood’s India: Hindi cinema as a guide to modern India’ (published in India as ‘Picture abhi baaki hai’).
Professor Dwyer’s other research interests include the Asian elephant in India, and she has published papers on the elephant in cinema, in literature and religion as well as several reviews and non-academic features.
Professor Dwyer is currently Co-Investigator on the AHRC Network Grant, ‘Soft Power, cinema and the BRICS’, with Dr Stephanie Dennison, University of Leeds.