Film Screening: Films to Die For (Lúcia Nagib, 2025)

As part of the 2026 Global Cinema Symposium, the Bass School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology presents a special screening of Lúcia Nagib’s Films to Die For (2025), an essayistic documentary about cinephilia and the ways films speak to, borrow from, and give life to other films.

Taking Wim Wenders’s The State of Things (1982) as its point of departure, Films to Die For traces connections across European, Hollywood, and Brazilian cinema. Through archival material, film excerpts, original footage, and exclusive interviews with Wim Wenders, Walter Salles, Laura Mulvey, and producer Paulo Branco, Nagib examines the creative relationships, histories, and personal encounters that connect filmmakers across national and historical boundaries. The film also reflects on cinema’s recurring declarations of its own death and on the intense personal investment that filmmaking can demand.

Directed by internationally recognized film scholar and filmmaker Lúcia Nagib, Professor of Film at the University of Reading and Fellow of the British Academy, Films to Die For premiered at the 49th São Paulo International Film Festival in 2025. This special screening at UT Dallas marks the North American premiere of Films to Die For and is presented by Shot/Reverse Shot as part of the 2026 Global Cinema Symposium.

This international release of Films to Die For (2025), directed by Lúcia Nagib, was brought to you by film curator Yixiang Lin and presented by the MINT Chinese Film Festival, supported by funds from the AHRC Impact Accelerator Account at the University of Reading.