Seminar with Eyal Sivan

A double seminar led by documentary filmmaker, lecturer and film essayist Eyal Sivan was held in April. The first part was attended by about 180 listeners, while the second part was attended by a working group of 12 people to whom Eyal Sivan offered to make short film abstracts on essay projects they were developing.

Eyal Sivan was born in 1964 in Haifa, Israel and grew up in Jerusalem. After working as a professional photographer in Tel Aviv, he left Israel in 1985 and settled in France. Sivan has directed several acclaimed political documentaries, as well as produced films by other filmmakers. His films, screened and awarded at major festivals around the world, focus on individual stories and social memory. Sivan’s best-known films include “The Specialist – Portrait of a Modern Criminal” (1999), “Route 181 – Fragments of a journey in Palestine Israel” (2003) and “Jaffa, the orange’s clockwork” (2009). Sivan is the founder and artistic director of the Paris-based production company Momento! and the film distribution agency Scalpel, as well as the founder and editor-in-chief of “South Cinema Notebooks” – a journal on cinema and politics published by Sapir Academic College in Israel, where he regularly teaches. In recent years, Sivan has been a lecturer in media production at the School of Arts and Digital Industries (ADI), at the University of East London (UEL), where he co-led the MA program in Film, Video and New Media, and a professor at the Netherlands Film Academy. Sivan currently works with the University of Exeter in the UK and is a member of the editorial board of La Fabrique Editions in Paris.

The next seminars, hosted by film scholar, film critic and film essayist Catherine Grant, will take place on May 4 and 17.