Pamela Breda is a researcher and filmmaker whose work unfolds at the intersection of cinema, visual culture, and emerging forms of intelligence. Her practice-based research investigates film as a sensorial, ritual, and epistemic device—one capable of mediating between human perception, technological systems, and non-Western spiritual traditions. Drawing on phenomenology, anthropology, and film theory, she approaches cinema not merely as representation but as an experiential field in which affect, duration, and embodiment generate knowledge.

Central to her research is an inquiry into sensorial and ethnographic filmmaking, with particular attention to shamanic practices, ritual, and spirituality. Through experimental documentary forms, she explores cinema’s cathartic and transformative potential, positioning film viewing as a collective and quasi-ritual act that resonates with broader anthropological understandings of belief, embodiment, and mana. Her work is deeply informed by thinkers such as Bergson, Bazin, and Deleuze, as well as contemporary debates in visual anthropology and experimental documentary.

In parallel, she develops critical investigations into human–AI interaction, examining how algorithmic images and synthetic media reshape subjectivity, self-perception, and imagination under late capitalism. Her films and writings interrogate the ambivalence of technological progress—oscillating between fascination and unease—while situating artificial intelligence within longer histories of visual apparatuses, power, and desire. Across research, teaching, and filmmaking, her work reflects a sustained commitment to understanding cinema as a space where human vulnerability, technological mediation, and the fear of transformation converge.

Project: A Cinematic Exploration of Shamanic Practices in Europe
Drawing Down the Moon is a theory-driven and practice-based research project that investigates contemporary shamanic practices in Europe through cinematic exploration. Positioned at the intersection of experimental documentary, sensorial ethnography, and film philosophy, the project examines how ancient ritual forms persist, mutate, and re-emerge within late-modern European societies marked by secularization, ecological crisis, and technological acceleration. Rather than treating shamanism as an anthropological residue of the past, the project approaches it as a living, adaptive practice that articulates contemporary desires for meaning, healing, and reconnection.

At its theoretical core, the research reflects on cinema as a ritual technology—an apparatus capable of producing altered states of perception, collective affect, and embodied knowledge. Drawing on phenomenology, visual anthropology, and film theory, the project interrogates how moving images can engage with trance, repetition, rhythm, and duration without reducing ritual to spectacle or belief to representation. Shamanic practices become a lens through which broader questions emerge: how do contemporary Europeans negotiate spirituality outside institutional religion? How does ritual respond to capitalist temporalities of productivity, extraction, and speed? And what forms of knowledge are produced when cinema aligns itself with non-rational, sensorial, and liminal experiences?

The practice-based dimension consists of a series of experimental films developed through close, long-term engagement with practitioners across different European contexts. Filmmaking here is conceived as a relational and situated process, privileging attentiveness, bodily presence, and ethical proximity over explanatory narration. The camera functions not as an instrument of capture but as a participant in ritual space, registering gestures, sounds, atmospheres, and temporal intensities that resist linear storytelling. Through extended takes, tactile sound design, and immersive visual strategies, the films seek to evoke rather than explain, allowing viewers to encounter ritual as an experiential field.