Raúl Ruiz, and other directors, in webcast conversations via University of Aberdeen

The Directors Cut - Raúl Ruiz in conversation with Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli from 3sixty-tv/vimeo

The very enterprising and generous Department of Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen began its 'Director's Cut' series of public interviews last year, and is now set to launch this year's series, including conversations with Hans Petter Moland, Pawel Pawlikowski, and Jane Treays (also see HERE). The informative press release for this year's series is HERE; please visit the series' website for other details.

All of last year's interviews have been made available online in wonderfully long webcasts. These are very substantial free resources, indeed. Alongside Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli's great conversation with Raúl Ruiz (HERE), there are interviews with Allan Shiach (HERE), John Akomfrah (HERE), and the fabulous Nicolas Roeg (HERE). There's an interview with David Attenborough archived on a different page (but that one took a long time to load, so I haven't fully checked it out).

The Director's Cut series of interviews was the highly laudable initiative of Alan Marcus, Reader in Film and Visual Culture at Aberdeen, and a filmmaker himself. Film Studies For Free takes its deeply grateful blogger's hat off to Dr Marcus, and to Film at Aberdeen, for enabling these conversations, as well as for ensuring their online availability to a much, much wider (indeed, global) audience.