Dennis Lim and Rita Azevedo will participate in the "Filmmakers in Residence" program

Since the 2021-2022 academic year, Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola has been inviting prestigious professionals from different fields of filmmaking to live and work with the school community for short periods, within the ‘Filmmakers in residence’ programme. Throughout their stay (the duration of which will vary depending on the characteristics and stage of the projects in question), resident filmmakers work on their new film project with the help and support of the centre’s resources, while at the same time, sharing their methodology and creative process with students. The aim is to open up a space for debate and to establish a practical film experimentation project with students.

The first residency scheduled for the 2023-2024 academic year will commence on 7 November and finish on 5 December and will feature the film journalist and curator Dennis Lim (Malaysia, 1973). Head of Film Programming from 2013 to 2022 at the Lincoln Center, where he co-chaired the selection committee for the New Directors/New Films Festival, Lim has organised retrospectives on Jane Campion, George Cukor, Raúl Ruiz, Agnès Varda and John Waters, among others. He is the author of Tale of Cinema (2022), a monograph on the filmmaker Hong Sang-soo, and The Man from Another Place (2015), a critical biography of David Lynch that has been translated into several different languages. He has published critiques and articles in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Artforum, Cinema Scope and Film Comment, and has taught at both Harvard and New York University. Advisor and jury member at numerous film festivals and programmer of the 2010 Flaherty Seminar, in 2018 Lim was named a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters) by the French Ministry of Culture.

The subject he will be teaching to students on the Film Curating Studies course at EQZE will focus on artistic and cinematographic curatorial thinking from the 19th to the 21st century. The subject matter will explore theoretical questions about programming practices and cultural mediation, while at the same time examining the relationships and contrasts between artistic and cinematographic curating through different case studies. The subject will be complemented by a series of ten films based on the main theme of the essay on which Lim will be working during his stay at the school, which is linked to the past and present of film, reflected through its cultural and technological crises, as well as its supposed ‘deaths’. The Deaths of Cinema aims to explore this theme through the works of filmmakers such as Tsai Ming-liang, Wim Wenders, David Cronenberg, Kathryn Bigelow, Bill Morrison, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and David Lynch.

Following the residencies of Radu Jude (2021-2022 Academic Year) and Pedro Costa (2022-2023 Academic Year), the next filmmaker who will share their work with Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola students on the Filmmaking Studies course will be Rita Azevedo Gomes (Lisbon, 1952). Since her first feature film, O Som da Terra a Tremer (1990), Azevedo has developed a unique cinematographic approach. Her work and films, which include Fragile as the World (2001), A 15ª Pedra (2004), A Woman's Revenge (2012), Correspondências (2016), The Portuguese Woman (2018) and Danses Macabres, Skeletons, and Other Fantasies (2019), which she co-directed with Pierre Léon and Jean-Louis Schefer, have turned her into one of the most important figures in European cinema. Her latest work, The Kegelstatt Trio (2022), is an adaptation of a theatre play by Éric Rohmer. Her films have been screened and won awards at the Venice Film Festival, Berlinale, Viennale, the Locarno Festival and FIDMarseille, among others. For over thirty years, Rita Azevedo worked at the Film Department of the Gulbenkian Foundation and was a film programmer at the Portuguese Film Archive.

During her stay at EQZE, which will commence on 13 November and conclude on 1 December, Azevedo will offer students the chance to participate in the development of a film project entitled A Céu Aberto, on which she is currently working alongside the poet, playwright and scriptwriter Regina Guimarães.

‘Filmmakers in residence’ forms part of EQZE’s academic and research residency plan and aims to combine support for the creative process of the selected filmmakers, who will all be engaged in a specific project, with the generation of a space for mutual learning, intergenerational knowledge transmission and joint film research and exploration by students and established filmmakers.

Public programme

During November, Tabakalera will host two film sessions as the result of the residency programme created by Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola. The first will take place on Saturday 18 November and will feature the screening of Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006), introduced by Dennis Lim. The second is scheduled for Thursday 23 November, and will feature Rita Azevedo and her film Correspondências.