The event has been organised in partnership with Transnationalizing Modern Languages and the Italian Cultural Centre Wales. The event is organised around the screening of In My Mother's House, the new documentary by Àkos Östor and Lina Fruzzetti in Italian, Tigrinya and English (with English subtitles) on the many sides of multiple identities, familial bonds, and ambiguities of colonialism, stretching from the Horn of Africa to Italy and the USA. It focuses on the lives of an Eritrean woman, spanning four continents and three colonial rules, over eight decades, covering her youth during Italian colonial rule, the annexation of Eritrea by Ethiopia, her migration to the Sudan, and finally home to a free Eritrea; and that of her Italian-Eritrean daughter (the director herself). Their life experiences and widely dispersed family are placed into the context of global events and changes.

Lina Fruzzetti is Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. She holds several national and international appointments and has taught at the Universities of Khartoum, Dar es Salaam, University of Helsinki, ISCTE (Lisbon), and IIT Gandinagar (Ahmedabad, India.) She directs the South Asia Studies undergraduate major. She is serving (or has served) on numerous university governance committees, and national committees: Fulbright, ACLS, Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Her primary focus in social anthropology is kinship, ritual and the construction of gender; race and ethnic relations, as well as ethnographic film. She conducts research in two world regions, India and North East Africa.

Ákos Östör is among other things, an anthropologist and a filmmaker. Educated in Hungary, Australia, and the USA, he carried out fieldwork and documentary filming in India (West Bengal and Varanasi), Sudan, Tanzania, Italy and Eritrea. He taught at universities in the USA, Portugal, Sudan, India and Tanzania, and was a fellow at research institutes in Hungary, Australia, India and the USA. Currently an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Film Studies at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. His latest coproductions, “Singing Pictures” and “Songs of a Sorrowful Man,” are about the changing practices of traditional scroll painter/singers in a Bengali village near Calcutta.

The event will be followed by a wine reception from 7pm until 8pm in the foyer of the School. If you would like to attend, please RSVP.