Lydia Tuan is a PhD candidate pursuing a joint degree in Italian Studies and Film and Media Studies at Yale. Her dissertation seeks to redefine the stakes of the term ‘elemental cinema’ by proposing it as a formal-aesthetic mode through which the four Aristotelian elements contribute to an aesthetics of displacement in contemporary films that portray everyday hardships, such as African migration to the European continent, depopulation, and ecological ruin. She has published on contemporary auteur cinema, having written on the films of Paolo Sorrentino (Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 2019), Lisandro Alonso (Fata Morgana, 2021), Naomi Kawase (Film-Philosophy, 2022), and most recently, Agnès Varda (MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, 2023).