Biography

Raquel Schefer is a researcher, director, programmer and professor at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. She holds a PhD in Cinematographic and Audiovisual Studies from the Sorbonne Nouvelle University with a thesis dedicated to revolutionary Mozambican cinema, she has a master’s degree in Documentary Cinema from the Universidad del Cine (Buenos Aires) and a degree in Communication Sciences from NOVA University of Lisboa.

She published the book “El Autorretrato en el Documental” in Argentina, as well as several book chapters and articles in Portugal and abroad. She was Assistant Professor at the Universidad Grenoble Alpes, lecturer at Universities Paris Est — Marne-la-Vallée, Rennes 2, at the Universidad del Cine de Buenos Aires and at the Universidad de la Comunicación, in Mexico City, and a guest researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.

She is an FCT postdoctoral at CEC — University of Lisbon, at IHC — NOVA FCSH, and at the University of the Western Cape and co-editor of the film theory and history journal La Furia Umana. At CEC, she is coordinator of the group “Visual Culture, Migration, Globalization and Decolonization” and, at IHC, of the History and Image Workshop.

Research fields

• Anti-colonial, post-colonial and decolonial cinema
• Experimental cinema
• Self-portrait
• Modernism and primitivism

Selected publications

• Schefer, Raquel, “The Representation of Ritual and Cinema as a Ritual in Revolutionary Mozambique: Ruy Guerra’s ‘Mueda, Memória e Massacre’,” in Contemporary Lusophone African Film. Transnational Communities and Alternative Modernities, edited by Paulo de Medeiros and Livia Apa, 145-158. London: Routledge, 2020. [link]
• Schefer, Raquel. “The Laughing Alligator de Juan Downey (1979), un cinéma endo-cannibale,” Écrans 12 (2019): 215-231. [link]
• Schefer, Raquel. El autorretrato en el documental. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Universidad del Cine, 2008. [PDF]

Main projects

• Postdoctoral project “O transe do real: modernismo e primitivismo no cinema anti-colonial e pós-colonial” — Hosted by CEC — University of Lisbon and IHC — NOVA FCSH, and funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (SFRH/BPD/120884/2016). 2017-