Public lecture: 'SpilLover: lyric impulses, feminist love praxis' by Nobunye Levin - 3 October 2022

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Monday 3 October, 19:30
Netherlands Film Academy (Cinema on the 2nd floor)


We invite you to join our public lecture SpilLover: lyric impulses, feminist love praxis by Nobunye Levin on the 3rd of October at 19:30.

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SpilLover: lyric impulses, feminist love praxis
by Nobunye Levin
A screening and epistolary performance talk

About
SpilLover (2021), directed by Nobunye Levin, is a cinematic poem of relational film fragments assembled in dialogue with various films, songs and written texts about love and inspired by the film fragment as a mode of enquiry, where the fragment is also imagined as “enunciation”. A fragment is mobile, responsive, malleable and mutable. The film fragment as mode is about an on-going process of exploratory potentialities where the film fragment as artwork and knowledge reveals its open-endedness.
 
Love burns an appetite only to reignite it again. Love distracts, leaving one longing. How to love again. Women walk and wander and imagine how their love can liberate. Love spills over in stories shared, observations expressed and memories recalled. A feminist exploration of moments of women’s lives strung together by their appetite for love.
 
The screening of the film will be followed by a lyrical epistolary performance talk with Nobunye Levin and two of her collaborators on the film – filmmaker and writer Palesa Shongwe and artist and writer, Bettina Malcomess. Captured in the performance talk is a sensuous interplay of the collaborators’ disparate lyrical responses to the film in dialogue with the director. When seen in conjunction with the screening of the film, the performance talk operates as a kind of expanded cinema where facets of the film’s form and concept are made to spill over into the screening space/room through their embodiment in the performance and the performers.
 
The performance talk and screening will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Nduka Mntambo, Head of the MA film programme.


Speaker bio's
Nobunye Levin is a filmmaker, scholar and lecturer. Nobunye’s filmmaking practice and research is often concerned with the politics of aesthetics and is informed by the epistemic, poetic and political possibilities of cinematic experimentation. She is preoccupied with feeling and thinking in, and through, film practice to produce affective cinematic experiences. Nobunye completed a practice-based PhD at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She is a lecturer in the Film and Television department in the School of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. Nobunye is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in decolonising screen worlds in the ERC-funded Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies project, situated at SOAS University of London.

Bettina Malcomess is a writer and an artist based in Johannesburg. She is currently completing her PhD in Film Studies at Kings College London, a history of film and the South African War. She is the co-author of ‘Not No Place: Johannesburg, Fragments of Spaces and Times’ (Jacana, 2013). Malcomess runs a platform for collaborative experimentation across forms called the joining room, about to release the vinyl and publication: Proximal Distal: Sonic Passages. Working under the name Anne Historical, her artistic practice inhabits multivocality and density, embodied research and material investigation. She is currently producing work with analogue film and sound media that inhabits the entanglement of memory, technology and history: set of unfinished articulations in counterpoint voices, signals and gestures: an attempt to queer the signal.
 
Palesa Nomanzi Shongwe is a South African filmmaker, film scholar, and Fulbright recipient currently working as a writer, and Script Editor in both television and film. Palesa’s independent film practice includes both documentary and fiction. She has written and directed three short films, Atrophy (and the fear of fading) (2010), which won the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival in 2011 and has been featured at numerous festivals, including most recently, Vision Du Reel and VideoEx; uNomalanga and the Witch (2015), which won Best Short Film at the Durban International Film Festival (2015) and The Baobab Short Film Prize at Film Africa, UK (2016); and most recently, as part of the 5x5x5 Documentary Residency Program, she completed an experimental documentary 11 to 19. She in an alumnus of the Realness Institute (2020) and currently developing her first feature film.

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