Joe Garrard

Background:

I hold a First Class BA in Film and Literature and an MA for Research in Film & Television Studies (Distinction), both from the University of Warwick. My MA dissertation was titled Weathering the Storm: Representing Climate Trauma in Philippine Film After Super Typhoon Yolanda, which explored how Philippine film and installation art negotiated the seeming irrepresentability of ecological grief in the wake of one of the deadliest tropical cyclones ever recorded.

Current Research

Decoloniality, Memory, Futurity: Reconceptualising the Archive in Contemporary Global Cinemas

My PhD research is concerned with how contemporary filmmakers repurpose archival material to redress the lack of agency formerly colonised peoples have had in writing their own history. In taking archival footage or documentation that once denigrated them, or filling the gaps in recorded history with their own narratives and histories, what has come to be known as the ‘Archive’ becomes a fluid conceptual space for the realisation of liberatory decolonial futures.

Drawing explicitly on decolonial and cultural theory, and cinematic case studies which range from the UK to the Philippines and Latin America, my research ultimately aims to provide a theory of decolonial archival engagement that highlights cinema’s potential to reorient our understanding of colonial history and promote social and racial justice.

My research is supervised by Dr Tiago de Luca.

Research Interests

World/global cinemas; de/post-colonial theory; Philippine cinema; counter-archival/anarchival filmmaking; global diaspora cinemas; ethnographic film; ecocinema; slow cinema.

Conference Papers

2025

• ‘The Rural Counter-Archive and the Forest in the Cinema of Lav Diaz’, part of the panel “Rural Aesthetics in Global Cinema”, BAFTSS Conference 2025, University of Warwick (26th-28th March)
• ‘Film is dead, please omit flowers’: Anarchival Aesthetics and Epistemic Refusal in Khavn De La Cruz’s Makamisa: Phantasm of Revenge (2024),’ Film and Television Studies Research Day 2025, University of Warwick (14th May)

2024

• ‘Speculated Histories/Liberated Futures: Labouring Towards a Philippine Autohistory in the Cinema of Raya Martin’, BAFTSS Conference 2024, University of Sussex (3rd-5th April)

Reviews

• Gaza on Screen, Nadia Yaqub (ed), 2023, Duke University Press Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television https://doi.org/10.1080/01439685.2025.2477333.

Memberships

• BAFTSS: British Association of Film, Television, and Screen Studies