Dr. Nadin Mai

I have received my BA (Hons) in Film Studies and French from the University of Stirling (First Class) in summer 2011, after which I began a MLitt course at St Andrews University. I received my degree with (First Class) in summer 2012. In autumn of the same year, I started my doctoral research into the phenomenon of Slow Cinema.

My studies have opened a variety of interests and field of study, which I still follow to this date. My BA gave me a chance to explore practical filmmaking after two years of studying film theory. I was involved in directing and editing news items, short reports, and a short documentary called "A Bunch of Gentlemen". The latter was my dissertation project and had been done in a team. My MLitt, a fully theoretical course of one year, allowed me to discover my fascination for archival research, which I originally began as part of a larger project about the history of cinema(s) in St Andrews. My dissertation explored the uses of cinema houses in Scotland during WW II, and looked in particular at the ways in which cinemas in Scotland had been used for fundraising campaigns, Church meetings and Ministry of Information talks. During my doctoral research I looked at the ways in which director Lav Diaz used an aesthetic of long duration and absence in order to represent individual and collective post-trauma on screen. My PhD, entitled "The aesthetics of absence and duration in the post-trauma cinema of Lav Diaz", combines the field of Slow Cinema with that of Trauma Cinema, and was the first in-depth and single director study of the films of Lav Diaz.

Today, I work as writer and critic for my website The Art(s) of Slow Cinema, the single largest database in the English language on Slow Cinema. I have also written for a number of publications, such as for the BFI, photogénie, Multiplot!, Lo Specchio Scuro and Guernica. I curated a special Slow Cinema section for Highball TV and contributed to festival catalogues. In 2021, I published "Human Condition(s) - An aesthetic of cinematic slowness", followed in 2022 by "The Art(s) of Slow Cinema - The 10th Anniversary Anthology, 2012-2022".

My work has been translated into Arabic, Greek, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.