Life’s tender resilience: On reunion and separation in Armenia, joy in the face of conflict, and a cinema of nostalgia in Maria Saakyan’s Mayak/The Lighthouse
by Ilinca Vanau
Program
Life’s tender resilience: On reunion and separation in Armenia, joy in the face of conflict, and a cinema of nostalgia in Maria Saakyan’s Mayak/The Lighthouse
Ilinca Vanau
Ilinca Vanau is a writer and photographer living in Edinburgh. Born in Romania, she moved to Scotland a decade ago to study at the University of St Andrews, where she received her undergraduate degree in Social Anthropology and Film Studies. Her academic journey has happened in tandem with ventures into publishing, curating and film programming as well as work on several long-term photographic projects. In 2018, she returned to the University of St Andrews and completed an MLitt in Film Studies with a thesis exploring the formal correspondences between films by Chantal Akerman and Sergei Loznitsa. Ilinca is drawn to cinema that touches upon the fields of documentary film, visual anthropology, sensory ethnography and is interested in cinematic thinking and the ethics of film form. More broadly, she turns to moving image practices to question and taste the intimate relationship between time, memory and identity.