A University of Sussex filmmaker has won a specialist academic award for her film that explores the relationship between cinema and philosophy.

Joanna Callaghan’s ‘Love in the Post’ was named as ‘best practice research project’ by The British Association for Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) annual conference on 14 April 2016.

The panel felt that the winning entry provided “a compelling, insightful and original rumination on the relationship between film and philosophy”.

‘Love in the Post’ is inspired by the 1980 book, The Post Card, by the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Like the book, the film plays with fact and fiction, weaving together the stories of a professor of literature’s troubled relationship with his wife and a film director’s attempt to make a film, as well as interviews and insights from critics and philosophers.

It features a never-before-seen interview with Derrida, whose philosophical ideas about how people construct and deconstruct meanings are notoriously difficult to explain and understand.

The BAFTSS awards panel felt that the film successfully  managed “ to enact the theoretical concerns explored in Derrida’s original text, breaking new ground by performing the production of knowledge within the film itself”.

Joanna Callaghan, a Senior Lecturer in Filmmaking in the School of Media, Film and Music, produced and directed the film and wrote it with Martin McQuillan, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Kingston (and a Derrida scholar).

She said: "I am delighted to win this award and for the acknowledgement of the original contribution that practice research can make in generating new knowledge and insights.

“I am particularly pleased that the project provides an example of innovative interdisciplinary research and demonstrates how fruitful such collaborations can be."

‘Love in the Post’, was funded and supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, University of Bedfordshire, Kingston University, University of Sussex and Heraclitus Pictures.

It was premiered at Somerset House in London in 2014, and has been shown at cinemas including HOME in Manchester and the Australia Centre for the Moving Image.   It was also reviewed in Times Higher Education .

Love in the Post: From Plato to Derrida from Heraclitus Pictures on Vimeo.