Conversa Com Ben Russell / Talk With Ben Russell Por /With Susana Nascimento Duarte Conversa Talk

In this conversation, we will take as a starting point the themes of travel and cinematic utopia, which are central to Ben Russell's work, to discuss several of the director's films. We will explore his focus on uniting experimentalism, psychedelia, and ethnography as a way of questioning the sensory and subjective dimensions of cinema, thus expanding the spectrum of possible worlds it allows us to create and experience. - Susana Nascimento Duarte

Susana Nascimento Duarte

Susana Nascimento Duarte is Associate Professor in Film and Cinema Studies at ESAD-CR/IPL and a research member of CineLab at the Nova Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA/FCSH/). She integrated the research projects Film and Philosophy. Mapping an encounter (IFILNOVA/FCSH/UNL) and False Movement: Studies on Writing and Film (CEC/FLUL). She is currently a researcher of the project Fragmentation and Reconfiguration: experiencing the city between art and philosophy (IFILNOVA/FCSH/UNL). She was one of the programmers of the Series of Meetings What is the Archive?, organised by Videoteca/Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa. She is the Interviews' Editor of Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image.

Ben Russell

Ben Russell (1976) is an American artist, filmmaker and curator whose work lies at the intersection of ethnography and psychedelia. His films and installations are in direct conversation with the history of the documentary image, providing a time-based inquiry into trance phenomena. Russell was an exhibiting artist at documenta 14 (2017) and his work has been presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art Chicago, the Venice Film Festival and the Berlinale, among others. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008), a FIPRESCI International Critics Prize (IFFR 2010, Gijón 2017), premiered his second and third feature films at the Locarno Film Festival (2013, 2017) and won the Encounters Grand Prize at the Berlinale Film Festival (2024). Curatorial projects include Magic Lantern (Providence, USA, 2005-2007), BEN RUSSELL (Chicago, USA, 2009-2011), Hallucinations (Athens, Greece, 2017) and Double Vision (Marseille, France 2024). He is currently based in Marseille, France.