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Film Screening: Conference of the Moths

Presenter(s)

Samhita Sunya

Date

April 25, 2025

Abstract:

In a 12th-century epic, Wise Hoopoe had upheld the moth and flame as an epitome of love. Now, committed to self-care, the moths have decided to shun the flame. Can Hoopoe once again show his fellow creatures the light? Conference of the Moths is a short 2-D paper cut-out stop-motion silhouette-animation film that is both a gentle parody and an homage to the 12th-century Persian epic poem The Conference of the Birds. Drawing out classical Indo-Persian motifs of light and darkness, of the moth and the flame, the original epic’s Wise Hoopoe returns to once again impart lessons on love, care, and connection for our current day and age.

 

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.