Screen Seminars at Glasgow

Speaker: Dr Tatiana Heise, University of Glasgow
Date/Time: 3 Dec 2013, 5-7pm
Venue: Room 408, Gilmorehill Centre, University of Glasgow
Title: Lúcia Murat: Memory, History and Brazilian National Identity

‌This ‘work in progress’ paper will focus on Lúcia Murat, one of the most significant female directors in Brazil. Murat started her career as a journalist after having been arrested and tortured by Brazil’s military police in the 1970s due to her participation in armed guerrilla groups struggling against the dictatorship. Her subsequent work as a journalist and filmmaker has been marked by the desire to denounce some of the worst state crimes committed in Latin America and the need to free herself from past experiences of oppression and control.
Tatiana will discuss some of Murat’s award-winning films, including Que Bom te Ver Viva/ How Nice to See You Alive (1989), Quase Dois Irmãos/Almost Brothers (2004) and A memória que me contam/Memories They Told Me (2013), paying particular attention to the different strategies they employ for the reconstruction of memory and to how these films confront dominant discourses of Brazilian national identity through a radical reinterpretation of history.

Tatiana Signorelli Heise received her PhD in Latin American Studies from the University of Leeds. She holds an MA in the Sociology of Contemporary Culture from the University of York’s Sociology Department and an MPhil in the Sciences of Communication from the University of São Paulo. Prior to her appointment at the University of Glasgow, she worked as lecturer in the Department of Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Manchester and as Teaching Associate at the University of York’s Film, Theatre and Television Department. She has worked for an environmental and animal welfare organisation in the Amazon region of Brazil and she has a prior career as a journalist in São Paulo. Dr Heise is the author of Remaking Brazil: Contested National Identities in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema (University of Wales Press, 2012) and articles on political cinema, documentary activism and Brazilian audio-visual culture.