In the short documentary film “The Place between Was & Will Be”, filmmaker Theo Panagopoulos conducts a ritual of anticipatory grief in his Greek grandparents’ abandoned summer house, after his grandfather is diagnosed with dementia. By using the anthropological concept of liminality to explore the house’s past, present and uncertain future, the film aims to slow down the moment of a big change and open a discourse his family avoids to have. By using “The Place between Was & Will Be” as a case study, Theo Panagopoulos will discuss how he uses the act of filmmaking as an intervention of care where the tools of film become transparent with space and time becoming essential in allowing truth to emerge organically through the process. He will discuss how the form of film as ritual-making allowed to engage with the topic of dementia through a different creative and conceptual avenue by using the empty house as a physical manifestation of the liminal space through which difficult emotions can be addressed. Lastly, he will explore what he learned through the process of making this intimate film and how he uses the act of film as intervention in his following film and research work

Theo Panagopoulos is a Greek-Lebanese-Palestinian filmmaker, film programmer and PhD researcher based in Scotland. His creative and academic work explore themes of collective memory, displacement, fragmented identities and language. His films have been commissioned by Screen Scotland, British Film Institute Network and Scottish Documentary Institute and have screened in many festivals internationally winning several awards. He is currently an Associate lecturer at the University of the West of Scotland where he is doing his PhD research on using performance as a decolonial counternarrative to colonial film archives. (https://www.theopanagopoulos.com/)

The Images of Care Collective, the Association for Anthropology, Gerontology and the Life Course (AAGE), the Visual Anthropology Network of the European Network of Social Anthropologists (VANEASA) and AGENET are delighted to invite you to the new webinar series on images, ageing and care which will be held monthly throughout 2024! This webinar series – free and open to all- gathers anthropologists and image-makers interested in exploring the ontological and epistemological connections between images, aging and care, treating the relationship and these phenomena as requiring and inviting interrogation.

It is sponsored by the Images of Care Collective, the Association for Anthropology, Gerontology and the Life Course (AAGE),  EASA’s Age and Generations Network (AgeNet) and the Network for Visual Anthropology of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (VANEASA).