Mimesis Without Organs: Flying Lessons by Elizabeth Nichols + Eggshells by Luiza Parvu
Mimesis without Organs presents:
A screening and conversation with Luiza Pârvu
February 9 | 6:30pm MT | VAC 1B20
Eggshells by Luiza Parvu
2025, 11:40 minutes
A transcontinental daughter-mother conversation about the life of Romanian women under dictatorship and patriarchy is catalyzed by sea changes in the Arizona abortion law, Orthodox Easter egg painting, and the migrant experience. Through sisterhood and solidarity, the film seeks to create common ground and heal intergenerational trauma. Eggshells is part of the Abortion Clinic Film Collective.
Flying Lessons by Elizabeth Nichols
2024, 84 minutes
Edited by Luiza Parvu, written by Chris Boeckmann, Elizabeth Nichols, and Luiza Parvu.
When their Lower East Side building comes under siege by a predatory landlord, a young filmmaker and an aging punk artist forge an unlikely friendship. As the two women collaborate on a portrait of a creative life amidst NYC’s cultural crisis, they discover what it means to be neighbors.
Luiza Pârvu is a filmmaker and visual artist, an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University's Poitier Film School, a Senior Programmer at the Mimesis Documentary Festival in Boulder CO and an affiliate of the Melikian Center at ASU. A member of the European Film Academy, she has directed and edited feature and short films that have screened at festivals worldwide, including Sundance, True/False, BFI London, Karlovy Vary and Tribeca. Her work explores identity, memory, and transformation, often in conversation with other artists, scientists, or collectives. From human migration and environmental transformation to intergenerational reverberations of oppression, in projects produced across North America, Europe and Eurasia, she seeks often-invisible connections between the past and present to imagine possibilities for a better future. She is an alumna of NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and a co-founder of Root Films, a Bucharest-based production company that sustains her research, creation, and community-building.
Elizabeth Nichols is a writer, director, and cinematographer of non-fiction and narrative films. She currently lives in Tanzania, East Africa with her partner and their two daughters, and works at Orkeeswa as the Director of Strategy and the creator of Story Lab where she teaches filmmaking. Elizabeth graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2017 with an MFA in Filmmaking and from Harvard University in 2010 with a BA in History and Literature and History of Art and Architecture. She has received several awards and scholarships in support of her filmmaking, including being featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces in Film, a New York Women in Film and Television Scholarship, the Wasserman Directing Award, the Alan Landsburg Documentary Production Award and the Princess Grace Award. Her short films have played at some of the top international film festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival and the Berlinale.