Event

In line with Penn’s Covid19 response guidelines, the Cinema & Media Studies Program canceled the event below. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause and send our best wishes to all.

Unfinished Business: Unseen Films, Unheard Stories
A Film Series curated by Robert Cargni, Film Programmer, for Penn Cinema & Media Studies.

"Distribution circuits and exhibition venues and platforms substantially limit our access to the films we can watch. As a film programmer, my aspiration has always been that of recuperating part of the heterogeneous richness of world cinemas and local film cultures and to make it available to audiences interested in expanding the breadth and diversity of their film experience. As part of this always unfinished business of cultural recovery, I like to present to you a group of virtually unseen films that tackle some of the most pressing questions of our times: migration, social marginalization, gender inequality, racial discrimination, and the systematic impoverishment of the Global South. This film series offers you the opportunity to expand your familiarity with diasporic filmmaking, women’s cinema, contemporary film cultures in Latin American and the Caribbean, as well as with filmmakers operating at the peripheries of the American and European film industries." (Robert Cargni)
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Aboio
Marília Rocha, Brazil, 2005, 73 mins., in Portuguese w/ English subt.

Marília Rocha is one of the most interesting young filmmakers working in the context of contemporary Brazilian documentary cinema. Her films have been selected and awarded in a number of Brazilian and international film festivals. Since her debut feature Aboio, Rocha’s work has broken with the tradition of “film-verism” and the form of the journalistic reportage, inaugurating new avenues of experimentation for Brazilian documentary cinema.

"Set in the raw reality of the sertão, Marília Rocha's film Aboio is most surprising for its tone, a dreamlike lament. […] It captures the extinct oral practice used by cowherds of singing while driving cattle down paths; by way of this wordless song, with its final phrase of admonition, he communicates with the cattle, sending it out to graze or to the corral, singing what José de Alencar called a ‘sublime hymn to yearning.’" (Eduardo Escorel)

The film will be introduced by Dana Khromov, Ph.D. Candidate in Hispanic and Portuguese Studies at the University of Pennsylvania
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Robert E. Cargni is formerly the film programmer and gallerist for Film @ International House Philadelphia. Robert has also curated film programming for the University of Pennsylvania Museum, as well as numerous international film festivals across the United States and Canada.