Associate Professor Deirdre Boyle has just returned from the Visible Evidence XXIV conference on documentary, held this year in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  There she gave a paper on the latest work by Franco-Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh. Both his 2016 film and 2017 installation are titled Exile: the latter addresses the global problem of refugees today and the former is based on Panh’s own experience as a survivor of the death camp that was Democratic Kampuchea in the 1970s.  Boyle’s essay, “ Exile, Within and Without: New work in two modes from Rithy Panh,” will be published in the Fall 2017 issue of Film Quarterly and is due out in September.

Deirdre’s trip to Buenos Aires also allowed her to visit ex-ESMA, the infamous torture center of the Argentinian Dirty Wars, and La Plaza de Mayo where Les Madres have demonstrated every Thursday for the last 40 years ever since family members “disappeared.”  For fun, yes fun, she stayed up late to go to La Cathedral, a fabulous milongo hideaway, to see and hear tango performed by passionate amateurs.  Death, sex and tango—what more could you ask?!

Deirdre Boyle is core faculty in the Graduate Media Studies Program at New School University. A video historian, media critic, consultant, and psychotherapist, she is the author of Subject
to Change: Guerilla Television Revisited.