Cinematheque Lectures & Discussion

The series of discussions and lectures organised by Meno Avilys goes beyond the academic community, inviting all those interested in moving images to broaden their knowledge together with contemporary film and cultural researchers.

Illustration: a still from Maya Deren’s film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) in the exhibition Jonas Mekas and the New York Avant-Garde (Lithuanian National Gallery of Art, 2021-2022). Photo by Ugnius Gelguda.


The lecture by Chris Berry from King’s College London “Techno-Fragility and Hope: LED Screen Death and the Maidan”.


The lecture by Petr Szczepanik from Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic) “Transnational Production Networks and Peripheral Media Capitals: Prague as a Global Film”.


Lecture The Horrors of Motherhood in Irish Films: a study of representation and industry participation by Dr. Sarah Arnold (Assistant Professor of Media, Maynooth University) and Dr. Anne O’Brien (Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies, Maynooth University).


International Scholarly Symposium “The Emergence of Cinema at the Imperial Borderlands of Central-Eastern Europe”. This one-day symposium turned to the history of early and silent cinema of the Central-Eastern Europe.


Lecture “Pioneers, Divas, Visionaries – The Women of Arab cinema” by Irit Neidhardt. Irit Neidhardt is a distributor for films by Arab directors and author of various texts dealing with cinema and the Arab World.


Retrospective film program “Rebellion, Love and Friendship: U.S. Independent Woman‘s Cinema” introductory lecture by film programmer and curator Herb Shellenberger (USA/UK).


“Amateur filmmaking in Soviet Lviv: Individual Practices” by Oleksandr Makhanets. He is a historian, archivist, curator of exhibitions, and head of the Urban Media Archive at the Centre for Urban History from Ukraine.


“Filmmaking Is for Lovers: Rediscovering Soviet Amateur Film Culture” by Maria Vinogradova. She is a film and media historian specializing in the study of Soviet film culture, in particular, nonfiction and amateur films: their creation, distribution, circulation, and afterlives in the post-celluloid era.


“Political, social, and cultural meanings behind Soviet Latvian amateur films (1955–1991)”  by Inese Strupule. She has received her PhD from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Her thesis concerned the amateur filmmaking movement in Soviet Latvia and its social, cultural, and political impact. 


Lecture by Utrecht University researcher dr. Judith Thissen “What is the New Cinema History?”.