ABOUT
Livan Garcia-Duquesne was born in Paris at the beginning of the millenium, although of that city he only remembers the sidewalks and crowded buses. Soon after his birth, his parents decided to find their place down south in Spain, where his grandfather had come from. His affiliation to France nonetheless lingered in the form of an education at a French Lycée until the age of eighteen.
Soon after, his interest turned to the United Kingdom where he thought of studying Film at University. He spent three years in the North West of London at the University of Westminster, where he specialised in producing short documentaries for his studies, while writing, directing, co-producing and scoring an independent project, Oranda, a 30-minute short film, shot in Cornwall and inspired by Japanese ghost tales and the novels of Hermann Hesse. In his final year on the BA, he produced a short documentary set in Turkey, in a village near Marmaris, which focused on a British expat woman running an illegal shelter for animals. Later on, he produced one of the four graduation final projects of his course: a documentary about an ageing farmer in Wales, having to confront the prospect of finally retiring. In that year, he was also Co-President of the Westminster Film Society, which he helped rebrand as a venue dedicated to the curation of cinematic seasons which would focus on particular themes or aspects of film history and theory. With a growing interest in continental philosophy, he wrote his Bachelors dissertation on the '(re)presentation' of the Lacanian concept of the Real in the work of Polish filmmakers Krzysztof Kieślowski and Andrzej Zulawski.
This work in film theory led him to the University of Cambridge, where he enrolled on an MPhil in Film & Screen Studies in 2020. His academic work focused on Gilles Deleuze and the time-image, the films of Marguerite Duras, the tension between formalism and realism in Aleksei German, and the representation of historical trauma in Fernando Solanas' 1985 Sur in relation to Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History. He graduated with a Distinction and a Jennings Prize for Academic Excellence. Since then, he has written articles and film reviews for websites and magazines, such as Alborada: Latin America Uncovered, BrasilWire, DMovies and Open Democracy.
Within the field of cinema, he is currently developing a featurette, A Short Film About Chance, inspired by the short stories of Borges and Krzysztof Kieslowski's Dekalog series. He is also co-writing a short film, A Judge's Appetite, a satirical comedy on the justice system, with fellow filmmaker Finian James Tempest. Livan Garcia-Duquesne is also a musician and composer, having performed, recorded and produced his first album, The Desert Breaks, in 2022.