Ina Karkani studied English and Gallo-Roman Studies at the Universities of Heidelberg and Stuttgart, where she graduated with a Magister Artium. She completed postgraduate studies in English Literature and Culture with a focus on film at the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece, and in Film Studies at the Institute of Film Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Since October 2021, she has been a research assistant at the GRK Normativity, Critique, Change at Freie Universität Berlin with the research project Ontological Drifting: Animalizing Film Form in Contemporary Cinema.

Ina works as a freelance film curator and moderator for the Generation section of the Berlin International Film Festival, Berlinale. She was a jury member for short films at the Portuguese film festival Frames and worked for the Stockholm International Film Festival.

SIS Stockholm International School, Stockholm, Sweden.

Public Private Education, Thessaloniki, Greece.

The research project Ontological Drifting: Animalizing Film Form in Contemporary Cinema focuses on viewing experiences in contemporary films in which humans and non-human animals encounter each other. Assuming that films communicate with their viewers, a corpus of contemporary works examines the relationship between film aesthetics and corporeality, embodiment, and modern subjectivity, particularly in images that blur the ontological boundary between humans and animals. To this end, contemporary phenomenology will be related to animal studies and hermeneutic discourses of bodily normativity. The guiding questions of the research can be summarised as follows

To what extent can human and non-human animals be understood as texts? How can we gain insight into our emotional involvement in human and non-human worlds through such cinematographic representation? To what extent does this kind of cinematic creation critique and transform the normative experience of seeing within (animal) cinema?

Further research interests

• Native and Indigenous Studies
• Animal and Feminist Eco-Critical Studies
• Affect Studies
• Cinema of the Body
• Reception Theory
• Media and Culture
• Memory and Nostalgia Studies

Karkani, Ina (im Druck). Zur Filmischen Inszenierung der Kreatürlichen Person. Tierstudien. Person und Persönlichkeit. Jessica Ullrich (Hg.) Neofelis Verlag.

Karkani, Ina (2022). Bodies out of Place: Ontological Adriftness in The Lobster. The Cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos. Films, Form, Philosophy. Eddie Falvey (ed.). Bloomsbury.

Karkani, Ina (2019). Bergman’s Women. Female Gender Representation in Summer With Monika, Persona, and Scenes From A Marriage. Film International, Vol.17, No.1., 50-56.

Karkani, Ina (2016). Aesthetics of recession: Urban space and identity in Attenberg and Beautiful Youth. Journal of Greek Media and Culture, 2(2), 201-2016.

Karkani, Ina (2015). Framing the Weird Body in Contemporary European Cinema. In L.Lambert (Ed.),The Funambulist Papers,Volume 2 (pp. 198–203). Punctum Books.