On May 27-29, FILM AND DEATH will be hosting the conference Death in the Eyes 2: Philosophical Perspectives on Film Genres and Death, organized by team members Lucas Ferraço Nassif, Marco Grosoli, Pedro Inock, Susana Viegas, Tiago Cravidão and Vasco Marques.
The first day will include a screening of Mãe Fátima (2009), a documentary by filmmaker Christine Reeh-Peters, who will be present at the session.
The film opens in Portugal, where Fatima, a seventy‑year‑old Catholic Angolan nurse, tends to homeless people for a humanitarian health NGO. After decades abroad, she decides to return to her home country with the same organisation, which is trying to keep a rundown hospital in Menongue, a city in the south of Angola, set in a landscape of remnants left by one of Africa's longest civil wars. The hospital becomes Fatima's antagonist: a building without running water or oxygen, where the smell of refuse and decay infiltrates skin and soul, and where, as she puts it, one has to believe in something — simply to face the next day. Combining observational scenes and voice‑over sequences with a few staged moments, the film accompanies Fatima from ward to ward. We sit with two dying patients whose fates the film does not yet know; we look into a mortuary where mutilated remains of corpses lie; we witness the preparation of a funeral as a mourning ritual.
In doing so, the film keeps separate, and at times holds together, three kinds of image: images of dying, images of death (rendered visible obliquely, through atmosphere and ritual), and images of corpses. With them come questions: What is the ontological status of the "deadly" image — the depiction of an irreversible event that returns, ghostlike, with every projection? What can a documentary let us know of another person's dying, and how do proximity, duration, selection and composition shape the experience of spectatorship, of bearing witness to this threshold experience? And what responsibilities does the filmmaker assume when she shows dying, death or corpses — where is the line between testimony, memorialisation and voyeurism, and when do images transgress the boundaries of intimacy, consent or cultural taboo?
The conference full program is available here.
Admission is free, and all are welcome to attend at Auditorium B1 (Tower B, Room B102), NOVA FCSH (Berna Campus).
