4th semester of the Academy of World Cinema
The Academy of World Cinema is a joint venture between the University of Wrocław and New Horizons Cinema. UWr honours academy classes as extra-curricular and/or optional courses – students can earn course credits (including ECTS points).
The fourth semester of the Academy of World Cinema will be devoted to the cinema of the last thirty years. During thirteen lectures – delivered by film experts from all over Poland – we will look at the most important phenomena shaping the history of film at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will discuss what slow cinema is, what contemporary film realism looks like, how Generation X made its mark on the history of cinema and how genre filmmakers experiment with narrative. One lecture will also focus on the ecological aspect of contemporary film and ecocriticism as a new research perspective.
This semester will also provide an opportunity to get to know interesting cinema created outside the main centres of film production: in East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa or Central and Eastern Europe. For the programme includes meetings devoted to individual national cinematographies that have captured the attention of audiences around the world in the last few decades. Experts in contemporary Korean, Romanian, Ukrainian and Mexican film will bring us closer to the most important processes, phenomena and contexts determining the specificity of particular trends shaping the cinema in these countries.
The list of films accompanying the lectures will be equally diverse. It will include classic and iconic movies (‘Fight Club’ by David Fincher), as well as recent productions that premiered last year (‘Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn’ by Radu Jude); masterpieces of art cinema (‘Hate’ by Mathieu Kassovitz) and genre cinema (‘Nikita’ by Luc Besson); representatives of independent cinema (‘Heli’ by Amat Escalante) and mainstream cinema (‘Shutter Island’ by Martin Scorsese).
This diverse set of themes and films will make up a multi-faceted and multi-perspective story about world cinema of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
