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Independent French filmmaker Armel Hostiou will screen his latest production, Rives (“Day” in English), on Thursday, Oct. 25, at 7:30 p.m., in the Red Pit. The film is spoken in Bosnian, French and Urdu with English subtitles and runs approximately 75 minutes; Hostiou will answer questions after the showing.

Saving Face, the first of three films  in the fall 2012 F.I.L.M. (Forum on Image and Language in Motion) series will be screened on Wednesday, Oct. 17, at 4:15 p.m.  All screenings will take place in the Bradford Auditorium, KJ, and are free and open to the public.

In a Religious Dispatches essay, “‘Cult’ Cinema Comes of Age,” Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate examined recent films that focus on cults including The Master, the latest in the group. In the Oct. 7 article, Plate described The Master as “emblematic of a new, more nuanced treatment of cults in the movies,” and “more or less … the story of L. Ron Hubbard and the birth of Scientology.”

“The Ecocinema Experience” by Visiting Professor of Art History Scott MacDonald was published as the lead essay in Ecocinema Theory and Practice, a new collection edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani and Sean Cubitt.

Visiting Professor of Art History Scott MacDonald was the opening speaker at the new OpenDocLab, a salon for filmmakers, film scholars and other cineastes interested in documentary filmmaking, sponsored by the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT.

An article on The Washington Post website titled “Atheists find a new venue for the godless: on film,” and released by the Religion News Service, quoted Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies S. Brent Plate.  “An independent faith film festival will create film fests for similar reasons — to be with other, like-minded people, to laugh together and cry together and think together,” Plate said in the article that focused on the San Francisco-based, annual Atheist Film Festival. Published on Aug. 17, the article also appeared on the The Times-Picayune site.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood has named Visiting Professor of Art History Scott MacDonald an Academy Scholar for 2012. Each year the Academy chooses two scholars nationwide, awarding each a grant to pursue a research project.

Visiting Professor of Art History Scott MacDonald’s interview with filmmaker Pawel Wojtasik, “Perception as Transcendence,” has been published in the winter issue of Film Quarterly.  

Visiting Professor of Film History Scott MacDonald was the lead programmer at this year’s Brakhage Symposium at the Brakhage Center of the University of Colorado in Boulder on March 11-13.

Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies Brent Plate’s perspectives on this year’s Oscar nominees and the themes conveyed by them appear on several major media sites including CNN.com, Religion Dispatches and beliefnet.com. “It’s kind of an unusual year – almost all of the top films have relatively little explicit religious dimensions to them,” said Plate. “But these films are asking the same questions that religions ask: Where did we come from, how did we get here, where are we going and who are we?”