Dr. Sonja Bertucci

Sonja Bertucci (IMDb) is a filmmaker based in Richmond, USA, and an assistant professor of creative practice and film studies at the University of Richmond. Originally from France, she holds an MFA in Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and a PhD in French Literature and Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, Proust and Godard through the Lens of Intermediality, examines how Proust and Godard explore the expressivity of their own mediums in relation to other modes of representation, situating their work within a broader history of intermedial aesthetics—from Horace’s ut pictura poesis to Lessing’s Laocoön, to more recent philosophical discourses (Merleau-Ponty, Badiou, Rancière). While her academic work explores questions around cinema and the poetics of the past, with a focus today on Iranian cinema, her films thematize grief and loss, ephemerality, and marginalized subjects of cultural life. Her first feature film, entitled Stranger from Within, is a deeply personal film about postwar Serbian communities in postwar Kosova. It was selected for numerous international festivals and received the Special Jury Prize at the BelDocs International Documentary Festival in May 2015. Since then, it has been broadcast multiple times on national and regional television in Serbia (including RTS).

In 2017, she directed the experimental short A Hard World for Little Things, an homage to The Night of the Hunter, which screened at several national and international festivals. Her 2018 documentary Repairing the Earth, created in collaboration with writer-director-producer Laureline Amanieux, offers a poetic reflection on ecological resistance. It was broadcast on French television in November 2018 and later streamed on the ARTE platform.

Her most recent feature-length documentary, The Diamond Couple (2024), is an intimate meditation on love, aging, and the transmission of memory. The film premiered at the Arizona International Film Festival, where it received the Jury Prize for Inspirational Filmmaking, and continues to screen internationally.

Sonja is currently working on a new experimental project inspired by French writer Georges Perec’s Lieux, in collaboration with Los Angeles-based directors Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin. This project explores the relationship between individuals and their daily lives, the spaces they inhabit, in a world saturated with information, media, and self-generated images—at a pivotal moment when photography and imagery are being stripped of their indexical content and artificial intelligence increasingly permeates our everyday existence.