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The Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies, University of Toronto,
presents
Conference of the Moths (dir. Samhita Sunya, 2024)
A Special Preview Presentation
Samhita Sunya, University of Virginia
Friday, 25 April 2025, 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time
Location for In-Person Attendance:
Room 304, 4 Bancroft Ave, Toronto, ON, M5S 1C1
Zoom Registration Link for Virtual Attendance:
https://utoronto.zoom.us/meeting/register/JWC777-ATI-16b9lXOcvIA
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Abstract:
Bio:
Samhita Sunya comes to filmmaking by way of her career as a film historian. She is currently an Associate Professor of Cinema in the Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay (University of California Press, 2022), which is an account of the widespread, international popularity of Hindi song-dance films during the Cold War-era 1960s. Raised in Houston, Texas by South Asian immigrant parents, she has lived and worked in India, Lebanon, and Turkey. Her scholarship has been praised for its “rare… vulnerability,” for its focus on histories of love and cinephilia, and for the transregional and global dimensions of its historical research. Her first short film, Conference of the Moths (2024), draws on her familiarity with an array of artistic, literary, and cinematic genealogies of poetry and visual culture across South/West Asia. Her film, like her scholarship, is driven by a conviction that these genealogies and stories have so much to offer contemporary filmmakers, as we seek to render not only the world that we live in, but also the world in which we aspire to live.