This spring, third-year Warwick's Film & TV PhD candidate Misha Zakharov is staging multiple one-off events across London and Birmingham in collaboration with various institutions. These events, which combine screenings of rarely-seen films with discussions and curated book stands/printed materials, tackle subjects such as queer identities in Central Asia, epistemic violence and censorship in the Global South, and women’s prisons in the United States and Canada.

Thursday 24th April (18:30–21:00): Bush House, King’s College London – the UK premiere of Shubigi Rao’s film Talking Leaves (Singapore’s participation in the Venice Biennale, 2022), followed by a discussion with Ihar Ivanou, editor at the Belarusian diasporic publishing house Skaryna Press, alongside a curated book stand. This event also serves as an introduction to the symposium Scholarly Knowledge in the Context of Epistemic Injustice and Authoritarian Censorship:

Monday 28th April (19:00–21:30): Queer East, UCL East, London – lecture-performance on Kazakh countertenor Erik Kurmangaliev, followed by a screening of Uzbek filmmaker Rustam Khamdamov’s Vocal Parallels, accompanied by a specially designed libretto:

Tuesday 13th May (19:45–22:00): Flatpack Festival, the Mockingbird Cinema, Birmingham – Carceral Cinema, Act 1 featuring Janis Cole and Holly Dale’s P4W: Prison for Women (1981) and Christine Choy and Cynthia Maurizio’s Inside Women Inside (1978), followed by a discussion and curated book stand:

His topic is 'Two Faces of the Italian Film Industry: Dino De Laurentiis and Suso Cecchi D'Amico'.

The producer De Laurentiis was one of the architects of the rise of Italian cinema in the 1950s and 1960s, while Cecchi D'Amico, who for many years was the only working female screenwriter, authored over a hundred screenplays, including most of Visconti's films.