Nervous Translation screening

This screening event will centre on the acclaimed 2018 feature Nervous Translation, with director Shireen Seno and producer John Torres in attendance. Set in late 1988, in post-dictatorship Philippines, the film follows eight-year-old Yael, who, shy to a fault, lives in her own private world. One day she finds out about a pen that can translate the thoughts and feelings of nervous people.

The screening will be moderated by Elizabeth Wijaya, and will include an introduction and discussion with Bliss Cua Lim, John Torres, and Shireen Seno. All are welcome. Register at uoft.me/NervousTranslation. 

About the Speakers:

Shireen Seno is an artist and filmmaker whose work addresses memory, history, and image-making, often in relation to the idea of home. A recipient of the 2018 Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines, she is known for her films which have won awards at Rotterdam, Punto de Vista, Shanghai, Olhar de Cinema, Vladivostok, Jogja-Netpac, and Lima Independiente and have screened at numerous international festivals and art institutions. Seno was a 2022 Film Fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program and 2023 Visiting Professor for ArteVisione at c/o in Milan. Her first solo exhibition in Europe, "A child dies, a child plays, a woman is born, a woman dies, a bird arrives, a bird flies off," at daadgalerie in Berlin in 2023, travelled to Esplanade - Theatres By the Bay in Singapore in 2024. Her work is in the collections of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive. Seno graduated with a major in Architectural Studies in 2005.

John Torres is an independent filmmaker, musician and writer, known for his highly personal and poetic style. He co-runs Los Otros, a Manila-based space, film lab, and platform committed to the intersections of film and art, with a focus on process over product. His work fictionalizes and reworks personal and found documentations of love, family relations, and memory in relation to current events, hearsays, myth, and folklore. Weaving together archival clips, found footage, and visually powerful imagery, his films unfold narrative structures, often with strong autobiographical references, that defy conventional tropes and genres.

Elizabeth Wijaya is the Director of the Southeast Asia Seminar Series at the Asian Institute and Assistant Professor at the Department of Visual Studies and at the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. She works at the intersection of cinema, philosophy, and area studies. She is especially interested in the material and symbolic entanglements between East Asia and Southeast Asia cinema. Her work emphasizes a multimethodological approach, which is attentive to media forms, ethnographic detail, material realities, archival practices, international networks, and interdisciplinary modes of theorization. She is building an online-accessible collection of Asian short films with UTM library. She is working on her first monograph “Luminous Flesh: The Visible and Invisible Question of Contemporary Diasporic Chinese Cinemas” and her SSHRC Insight Development Grant-funded research project, "Luminous Waves: Visions and Networks of Collaboration in Contemporary Southeast Asian Independent Cinema." She is a co-editor of World Picture Journal.

Bliss Cua Lim is Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. Her first book, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic and Temporal Critique, was published by Duke University Press in 2009, with a Philippine edition by Ateneo de Manila University Press released in 2011. Bliss is a member of the Editorial Collective of the journal, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies and she also serves on the Advisory Board of Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication and Pelikula: A Journal of Philippine Cinema. Her new book, The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema, published by Duke University Press, analyzes the crisis-ridden history of film archiving in the Philippines.