The annual International Short Festival (Festival International du Court-Métrage: www.clermont-filmfest.com) each February in Clermont-Ferrand, France, probably marks the beginning of my active engagement with film. Between ‘81 and ‘87, while I was living in France, I worked each year with the festival as their translator, and in the process, learnt a tremendous about film-making and the medium of film. Check out their website for the 2008 festival! Fast forward to my work here at UC Davis, and here I regularly teach courses on film in the French and Francophone world.

I teach an introductory survey course to the history of cinema in France, and also regularly teach a course about shifts in filmic perspectives on the period of the German Occupation in France, “The Dark Years”: Film, History and Memory. The work of women film-makers; feminist film practice and theories; and the vibrant role of new vernacular media in addressing histories and memories of war in the North African Francophone world are all central research and teaching foci. I am currently finishing a book manuscript on Catherine Breillat’s films (Visions of Shame), and have just published an article on Nadir Moknèche’s film, Viva Laldjérie (2004), “Material Histories of Transcolonial Loss: Creolizing Psychoanalytic Theories?” Since 2005, in collaboration with the French-American Cultural Exchange and International House, I have organized an annual French and Francophone Film Festival at UCD.