26/10/2024

The Film-Phil Lisbon Seminars: Anna Magdalena Elsner

December’s Film-Phil Lisbon Seminar (2023-2024) will be led by Anna Magdalena Elsner (University of St. Gallen, Switzerland) who will talk about “Documenting Dying or Capturing Care? The Afterlives of Palliative Care in French End-of-Life Documentaries”.

ABSTRACT At the heart of this talk are three documentaries about end-of-life care in France: Les yeux ouverts (Frédéric Chaudier, 2010), Une maison au bord du monde (Pascal Cesaro, 2018) and Les Equilibristes (Perrine Michel, 2020). My aim is to explore how these documentary films engage with palliative care, the medical subspecialty which since Cicely Saunders’s pioneering work in the 1970s has become medicine’s main modality of dealing with death. Engaging with conceptual questions of the auto-documentary and ethnographies of care and vulnerability, I seek to untangle how the ethics of documentary filmmaking meets and collides with care ethics in the specific contexts of the portrayed institutions and their particular caring practices in the face of death. Highlighting how the films can be viewed as a commentary on societal engagements with dying, as well as oscillating between idealization and criticism of the philosophy of palliative, I explore the idea of an end-of-life documentary as an act of relational co-creation. As such, the practice of filmmaking partakes in Cicely Saunders’s totalizing view of pain and care, but also traces some of its limitations with regard to recent developments in political debates about end-of-life care in France.

The session is hybrid and will be held on December 4, 2024, at 15:00 PM (Lisbon time), at Colégio Almada Negreiros (room SE1) and online, via Zoom. To receive information about joining the meeting online, it’s mandatory to register in advance here.

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07/08/2026

“Swan Songs: Philosophical Reflections on Death, Time, and Memory in Testament Films” is out now!

We are pleased to announce the completion of the Special Issue “Swan Songs: Philosophical Reflections on Death, Time, and Memory in Testament Films”, guest edited by Vasco Baptista Marques and Susana Viegas for Arts. The Special Issue brings together seven original articles examining testament films from a philosophical perspective. Rather than approaching filmmakers’ final works merely as […]
06/08/2026

New Open Access publication by Susana Viegas

We are pleased to share that the book chapter “Derrida on Cinema’s Spectral Images: Time, Repetition, and Belief” by PI Susana Viegas is now available in Open Access through the publisher Brill. Published in “Derrida and Film Studies”, edited by Kamil Lipiński and Andrzej Marzec (Brill, 2025), the chapter explores Jacques Derrida’s reflections on cinema […]
06/08/2026

Join us at the Goethe-Institut Portugal for the cycle “Falar sobre a morte (nunca matou ninguém)”!

Organized by the Goethe-Institut Portugal, with contributions from the FILM AND DEATH team, Death Café, the association Doulas do Fim da Vida, and many other partners, the festival Falar sobre a morte (nunca matou ninguém) [Speaking About Death (Never Killed Anyone)] will open on September 17 at 5:00 pm with the interactive sound installation Memorial […]
03/08/2026

Join Anderson Santos and Lucas Ferraço Nassif at the Centro Português de Psicanálise

On September 1, 7:00 PM, the Centro Português de Psicanálise (R. da Assunção 7, 2º) will host a talk by Anderson Santos, moderated by Lucas Ferraço Nassif, on “Félix Guattari: Psicanálise e o Paradigma Ético-Estético”. This presentation will be in Portuguese. This presentation addresses the shift initiated by Félix Guattari within psychoanalysis, as he proposes […]
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Funded by the European Union (ERC, FILM AND DEATH, 101088956). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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