Praise for Film "Guardians of the Night" Co-Directed by Prof. Eleonora Diamanti
The Royal Anthropological Film Festival (RAI) recently published an article about the film “Guardians of the Night,” co-directed by JCU Communications Professor Eleonora Diamanti and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, Associate Professor of Visual Anthropology at the University of Victoria, Canada. The film was selected and screened in the Shorts category at the RAI Film Festival last April.
“Guardians of the Night” was shot in Guantanamo, Cuba, at nighttime. By focusing on the night, and particularly on the soundscape of Cuban nightlife, the film takes a special interest in engaging with the senses while doing visual ethnography. This creates a perfect focus to reinvigorate discussion and promote an innovative approach around sensory visual ethnography, in a time when audio-visual methods generally remain marginal within social sciences, and the idea of multisensorial anthropological film is often criticized for not being able to fully capture the sensorial world. The original soundtrack of the film was entirely composed by Guantanamo-based music composer Zevil Strix.
“Guardians of the Night” has been presented at international film festivals, such as RAI (Bristol, UK, April 2019); Vues d’Afrique – Festival international de cinema (Montréal, Canada, April 2019); Festival International du Film Ethnographique du Québec (FIFEQ) Montréal (March 2019); Materiali di Antropologia Visiva, Roma, Italy, (November 2018), École des arts visuels, Université Laval, (Québec, Canada, October 2018); CASCA-Cuba: Canadian Anthropology Society Annual Meeting (Santiago de Cuba, Cuba May 2018); Cuba première: Teatro Martí (Guantánamo, Cuba, April 2018).
In June, the film will be screened in the official selection of the Urban Audio-visual Film Festival in Lisbon, Portugal and the 14th Ethnographic Films Review Eyes and Lenses, Warsaw, Poland.
Professor Diamanti takes a special interest in visual and material culture and alternative modes of undertaking and disseminating academic research and has participated in research-creation projects in Canada, Italy, and Cuba. Since 2016 has been part of Emidio di Treviri, an independent research group working on the reconstruction process in Central Italy after the earthquake of 2016-2017 and she co-directed the short-length documentary “After the Earthquake” (2017). She teaches Introduction to Visual Communication and Media, Culture and Society at John Cabot University.
Read the article Sensory Ethnography and Nocturnal Worlds at RAI Film Festival
