DEFA Announces the 2023 Summer Film Institute Hidden Figures: Blackness and Black Experiences in East Germany

The DEFA Film Library at UMass Amherst announces the 11th biennial Summer Film Institute to be held June 11-17 in Amherst, Massachusetts.

The weeklong Institute, organized and hosted by the DEFA Film Library, will be co-directed by Priscilla Layne, associate professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and Evan Torner associate professor at University of Cincinnati.

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A keynote by Katharina Warda, sociologist and literary scholar and creator of the Dunkeldeutschland (Dark Germany) project, will open the Institute on Sunday, June 11.

The Institute is open to 30 international researchers and UMass graduate students are exempted from participation fee. The deadline to apply is Friday, Feb. 10.

A public film festival will be partially screened at Amherst Cinema in tandem with the Institute. The Institute mobilizes Black film theory to explore filmic representations of Blackness, as well as lived experiences of BIPoC in former East Germany.

Inspired by questions raised at DEFA’s Summer Film Institutes since 2007 and at Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA ) conferences since 2011, the film screenings and collaborative workshops will directly address (East) German notions of civil rights, equity, inclusion and difference, both under and after the end of state socialism.

For more information: umass.edu/defa