Cinema & Philosophy at Nimas: a film series
All great films are philosophical — not because cinema seeks to apply or illustrate philosophical concepts, but rather because cinema is itself a distinctive form of reflective thought.
This is the premise behind the Cinema & Philosophy at Nimas film series. Throughout the 2026/27 academic year, the series will present one screening per month, featuring major works from film history selected and discussed by researchers and lecturers from the NOVA Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA) and the NOVA University Lisbon Master’s programmes in Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics and Artistic Studies: Maria João Mayer Branco, João Pedro Cachopo, Nélio Conceição, João Constâncio, Bartholomew Ryan and Paolo Stellino.
Friday, 16 October at 18h
Screening of Mirror, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
Commentary by Bartholomew Ryan
ZERKALO
Mirror
by Andrei Tarkovsky
With Larisa Tarkovskaia, Ignat Daniltsev, Alla Demidova, Margarita Terekhova
USSR, 1975 – 108′
trailer
A man in his forties lies dying. As he confronts his own mortality, he begins to recall his past: his childhood during the Second World War, his mother, his son, his intimate life, and everything that shaped him, including the sweeping changes in post-war Soviet society. Mirror is Andrei Tarkovsky’s intensely autobiographical meditation, in which the filmmaker weaves together private and public memories, the intimate and the collective, the insignificant and the historical, through a rich interplay of flashbacks, dream sequences and period documentary footage. The result is an almost ghostly experience, in which Tarkovsky takes the everyday and makes us perceive it as something surreal. The film received only a limited release in the Soviet Union and was re-edited more than twenty times before Tarkovsky was finally satisfied with the result.
Bartholomew Ryan is an appointed research fellow at the NOVA Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA) at NOVA University Lisbon, where he is also a lecturer at the Department of Philosophy teaching a Masters course on ‘Art and Experience’ (with special emphasis on Ecological Thought in Philosophy and the Arts) and a Bachelor course on ‘Philosophy and Literature’.
1st semester of 2026/27 — next screenings
18 November — Ikiru, directed by Akira Kurosawa
Commentary by João Constâncio
3 December — Winter Light, directed by Ingmar Bergman
Commentary by Paolo Stellino