Evaporating Borders

  • Tuesday, December 1, 2015 / 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM (PST)
  • Pollock Theater
  • Screening Format: Sony 4K Digital Projection (73 Minutes)
  • With Iva Radivojevic (Director)

A poetic documentary treating the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe, Evaporating Borders (2014) weaves the testimony of asylum seekers on the island of Cyprus and the native Cypriots who have received and resisted them into a compelling portrait of a world in flux.

Following the screening was a Q&A with Director/Writer/Producer Iva Radivojevic, co-moderated by UCSB Film & Media Professors Bhaskar Sarkar and Laila Shereen Sakr.

Biographies

Director/Writer/Producer Iva Radivojevic

Iva Radivojevic is a filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She spent her early years in Yugoslavia and Cyprus before settling in NYC. Iva’s films have screened at numerous film festivals including the New York Film Festival, SXSW, Rotterdam IFF, Human Rights Watch, HotDocs, Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), and were broadcast on PBS,  Documentary Channel as well as the New York Times Op-Docs. She is the recipient of the 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2012 Princess Grace Special Project Award, 2011 Princess Grace Film Fellowship and was named one of 25 New Faces of Independent Film of 2013 by Filmmaker Magazine.

Her debut feature length documentary Evaporating Borders, has received numerous awards worldwide, was recently nominated for an International Documentary Association (IDA) Award, a Cinema Eye Honors Spotlight Award and received One World Media Award for Refugee Reporting. Her newest work Notes From The Border was commissioned for the launch of Field of Vision, a new documentary unit founded by Laura Poitras, AJ Schnack and Charlotte Cook.

Co-Moderator Laila Shereen Sakr

Laila Shereen Sakr is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her creative and scholarly works use digital logic and technique to map global participation in virtual worlds and networked publics. She is the creator of R-Shief media system for archiving and analyzing social media content, and the cyborg representation of VJ Um Amel. She has shown in solo and group exhibitions and performances at galleries and museums across the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East, and has published extensively. Prof. Sakr is a leading voice in the open source movement, in particular for Arabic localization. She is a co-editor for the open access journal: Media Theory, and also co-editor for After.Video (a paperback book and video stored on a Raspberry Pi computer packaged in a VHS case) published by Open Humanities Press.

Co-Moderator Bhaskar Sarkar

Bhaskar Sarkar is a professor at the UCSB Department of Film and Media Studies. His primary research interests include risk and speculative media; post-colonial media theory; political economy of global media; and history and memory. Sarkar is the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Duke University Press, 2009), a critical exploration of the cinematic traces of a particular historical trauma. He is coeditor of Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (Routledge, 2009), and a special issue of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies on “Indian Documentary Studies.” He has published essays on philosophies of visuality, transnational media, cineplasticity, and Indian and Chinese popular cinemas in journals such as Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Rethinking History: Theory and Practice, Cultural Dynamics, Framework, and New Review of Film and Television Studies. At present, he is completing a monograph titled Cosmoplastics: Bollywood’s Global Gesture, and a co-edited collection of essays, Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global(Duke University Press, forthcoming).

This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center and the Department of Film & Media Studies.

CWC Docs

The Carsey-Wolf Center is committed to screening documentaries from across the world that engage with contemporary and historical issues, especially regarding social justice and environmental concerns. Documentaries allow filmmakers to address pressing issues and frame the critical debates of our time.

CWC Global

Media are global by nature; they express culture just as much as they transcend borders. The CWC Global series is dedicated to showcasing media from around the world. This series features screenings and events that place UCSB in conversation with international media makers and global contexts across our deeply connected world.