School of Cinema PhD student wins Canadian scholarly award
PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies student Kester Dyer has been awarded the 2013 Gerald Pratley Award from the Film Studies Association of Canada (FSAC). Dyer is the first Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema student to win the honour.
The Pratley prize is awarded annually to MA or PhD students undertaking innovative research in cinema studies that will contribute to the understanding of Canadian/Quebec cinema both within this country and elsewhere. It is the only film studies award of its kind in Canada.
Dyer won for his proposal titled A Transportable/Transnational Cinema: The Wapikoni Mobile. The project will examine the ways that a mobile filmmaking studio made available to Quebec First Nations youth influences impressions of national space, borders and land, and builds on earlier Indigenous and Québécois cinematic precursors to challenge ideas about nationhood.
He will present his work in a special session of the FSAC conference to be held in May 2014 at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario.
“It’s a great honour to win this award,” says Dyer. “This is a really wonderful opportunity to explore a very exciting and inspiring subject and to benefit from the experience of exchanging with top film scholars from across Canada.
Professor Thomas Waugh, Dyer’s thesis supervisor, explains that although Canadian and Quebec cinema sometimes don’t seem very fashionable as graduate research topics, Dyer is one of the School of Cinema’s outstanding candidates trying to make sense of their immediate cultural environment.
“This award was named in honour of one of the great proponents of Canadian cinema and broadcasting in the postwar era, and it’s an honour for our still wet-behind-the-ears doctoral program for the award to come to alight here. I think it’s all the more appropriate that Dyer is investigating Wapikoni, one of our most vibrant, cutting-edge moving image phenomena of this century.”
Dyer’s doctoral dissertation investigates how unconscious fears, intercultural tensions and contradictions about cultural identity are conveyed in Quebec cinema across genres. In addition to being a film studies scholar, Dyer is also a filmmaker and a member of editorial board of Synoptique, Concordia’s online graduate film studies journal.