Keynote speakers

Professor Phillip Rothwell, Oxford University

Professor Phillip Rothwell specializes in the literatures and cultures of Portugal and Lusophone Africa. He favours psychoanalytic theory as a tool to furthering our understanding of Portuguese culture and its imperial aftermaths. An authority on the Mozambican writer Mia Couto and the Angolan author Pepetela, his current research focuses on disavowal as a structuring discourse in Portuguese colonialism.

Tata Amaral

Tata Amaral is an award-winning Brazilian film director, writer and producer based
in São Paulo. Her debut feature film, Um Céu de Estrelas (A Starry Sky, 1996) was received with considerable national and international acclaim. She has made a further five feature films, making her one of the most prolific woman filmmakers in Brazil. As well as directing, writing and producing for the cinema, Tata has a remarkable body of work made for TV, including the Globo hit series Antônia, a spin-off from her 2006 film of the same name, and the human-rights focused Rua! And Causando na Rua, made for cable TV (and currently available to view on YouTube).

Recently Tata embarked on an ambitious, ground-breaking project to document the mostly unknown and shamefully overlooked history of Brazilian women’s contribution to filmmaking. The thirteen episodes comprising As Protagonistas premiered in June/July 2021 on CineBrasilTV, to rapturous reviews, such as this one by Maria do Rosário Caetano: Tata Amaral surpreende com criatividade da série “As Protagonistas” | Revista de Cinema

ABIL conference participants will have exclusive access to two of the episodes of As Protagonistas, available to view online for the duration of the conference. For more on As Protagonistas, including teasers of all the episodes, see: As Protagonistas | Tangerina Entretenimento

Tata will appear at the conference via videolink and in conversation (in Portuguese) with Stephanie Dennison.