Lena Trüper, ELTS PhD candidate in Germanic Languages
Lena Trüper secured a 25,000 euro grant from the German Foundation Hessen Film & Medien to help create a documentary film called “Wake the Flies.” The film explores violence, displacement and trauma in Jos, a city of roughly 900,000 in central Nigeria. The film is a testament to the importance of transcultural dialogues, especially on difficult topics including colonial legacies, climate change, and social and political polarization. The concept of the film is directly inspired by Trüper’s research on the fraught cultural history and symbolism of the fly. Since the film was completed in April, it has been screened in Nigeria, Germany, and the United States. Trüper and her colleagues are now submitting it to film festivals and will be discussing the project at the annual conference of the German Studies Association this fall on a panel called ‘Hidden Transcripts.’ You can watch the trailer for “Wake the Flies” here. A full story about the film and Trüper’s collaborators can be seen on the UCLA Humanities Division website.