Assia Djebar: Algerian Images-son in Experimental Documentaries

This case study looks at French-Algerian author Assia Djebar, who made two little-known films. This chapter is an exploration of the limited but highly complex and challenging work of an important pioneering North African woman. Algeria’s particularly complex historical and political experience of independence from France, its relationship with Islam and its war-torn historical reality, have determined the lacunae in creative production. As some of the only films to ever have been made by an Algerian woman, La Nouba (1978) and La Zerda (1982) are masterpieces of feminist and anti-colonialist filmmaking. La Nouba is an explicitly feminist work, a documentary interlaced with experimental, symbolic fragments referring to international trends in feminist filmmaking in the seventies. As scholars of Algerian cinema have stated, cinema in the country is steeped in amnesia, consisting of fictional efforts that look away from reality. This chapter frames Djebar’s films differently from previous readings, and draws more challenging conclusions with regard to her transnational identity and her approach to women. More than feminist films, they reveal the filmmaker’s struggle with her own diasporic identity.

Selma Baccar: Non-fiction in Tunisia, the Land of Fictions

This chapter discusses a controversial icon of women in Tunisia, Selma Baccar, Tunisia’s first lady of filmmaking, an instigator and a fiercely independent woman still celebrated for her films and politics. Her first film Fatma 75 (1975) carried an intricately political statement of feminist defiance. The film looks at the time of independence and the subsequent struggle for women to gain their rights under the first president, Habib Bourguiba. Tunisia was a land of fictions, and even though Baccar roots her films in the reality of everyday life, most of them are essay films, due to restrictions put on the filmmaker by the Tunisian censor. Baccar, an intellectual artist, identifies strongly with her heroine and places her in a detailed historical context in order to analyse and critique Tunisian attitudes. She looks at past revolutions and women’s issues and in doing so, has served as women’s national memory. Her importance as documenter of the past has become central to 2011’s so-called ‘Jasmine Revolution’, as she now sits on the Assemblée constituante (Constitution Assembly) composed of elected members who are making an attempt at re-writing the Tunisian constitution.

Mai Masri: Mothering Film-makers in Palestinian Revolutionary Cinema

In Palestine, it is hard to find resident women filmmakers as the Palestinian people are so dispersed in exile throughout the world, and finding the means to make films inside the Occupied Territories is extremely difficult. Mai Masri, a Palestinian resident in Lebanon, was the first woman to start to make films about Palestinians in refugee camps throughout the Middle East. She is one of the pioneers of Palestinian documentary and especially of the trend that has become dominant in Palestinian filmmaking: a focus on children’s experience of Palestine. Her films illustrate how the struggle for a national identity in Palestine is often mixed with the struggle for personal, physical freedom. Motherhood, wifehood and womanhood are politicised identities in Palestine. In her earliest films such as Children of Shatila (1998) and Frontiers of Dreams and Fears (2001), she offers up children’s perspectives to illustrate the politicisation of even the most unlikely participants in the struggle against oppression. A child’s perspective is portrayed as a struggle with the past and the future that is on-going, as the child represents the hope as well as the hopelessness of the Palestinian cause.

Jocelyne Saab: Artistic-Journalistic Documentaries in Lebanese Times of War

The second case study looks at Jocelyne Saab’s early work. She is well-known for fiction films Dunia, Kiss Me Not on the Eyes (2005) and What is Going On (2010). However, it is less well-known that she started her career as a documentary maker during the Lebanese Civil War. She recorded the war from the inside. Saab is especially effective in her attempts to deal with the trauma of the civil war for children, safeguarding a national memory that has become entrenched in amnesia. Her films, such as Lebanon in Torment (1975), Beirut Never Again (1978), Letters from Beirut (1979) and Once upon a Time in Beirut (1995) illustrate how Lebanon’s film culture is in fact defined by (civil) war. While Saab lives between Cairo and Paris, Beirut is one of the most modern cities in the Arab world, and is stereotypically known as the Paris of the Orient. It has become the centre of cinema production in the region and has inspired many young filmmakers to reconstitute their Lebanese identity through documentary. In this context, Lebanese documentary is an intellectualist art form and an opportunity to experiment.

Ateyyat El Abnoudy: Poetic Realism in Egyptian Documentaries

The first case study deals with the ‘mother’ of Egyptian documentary making Ateyyat el Abnoudy, and traces her career as a lawyer, journalist and filmmaker. As a pioneer of politically engaged and socially preoccupied documentary, she has influenced many young female filmmakers. Since the early seventies, her films, both short and feature length, have been celebrated throughout the world at festivals and retrospectives, but remain controversial in Egypt itself. This case study looks in detail at her early short films, Horse of Mud (1971), Sad Song of Touha (1972) and The Sandwich (1975), as well as feature length documentaries Permissible Dreams (1982), Responsible Women (1994) and Days of Democracy (1996). Dealing with the lower classes, women’s issues, education and illiteracy among women, their personal status and their political situation in Egypt, the films reflect a concern with the subaltern woman. The filmmaker’s concern with the subaltern woman stems from an intellectual preoccupation with inequality and a professional insight into the unwillingness of the state to deal with women’s problems.

Introduction

The introduction to the book identifies the female pioneers of documentary in the Arab area. It paints the historical context in which these women have been making documentaries, looking across borders within the Arab World and across transnational regions, within the form, in the seventies and eighties, nineties and two thousands. The theoretical approach is rooted in feminist film studies and Third Cinema theory. Using Ella Shohat’s writings on women making films in a post-Third Worldist and feminist reality, the chapter specifies those aspects of Third Cinema that have been neglected. Painting a socio-political and historical context for the films under discussion, it looks at the cultural history of documentary as well as thematic and stylistic tendencies in the Arab world. From an examination of Third Cinema and its focus on documentary the chapter moves on to New Arab Cinema (or ‘Cinema Chabab’) and its attitude towards melodrama and realism. This ‘new’ approach to the transnational documentary includes a clearer, perhaps more practical look at developing ideas of production, distribution and spectatorship.

Hala Alabdallah Yakoub: Documentary as Poetic Subjective Experience in Syria

Against all the odds, and within a highly restrictive production context, women have been and continue to be the most politically engaged filmmakers in Syria. While feature‐length fiction films by women are rare or non‐existent, documentary maker Halla Alabdallah is working across different genres with obvious degrees of resistance. Trained by Omar Amiralay (Syria’s foremost documentary maker), her style is singular and experimental in nature. Her first film, I am the One Who Brings Flowers to her Grave (2006) was the first documentary made by a woman in Syria. It is a lyrical portrait of solidarity between women across the ages that experiments with ‘representation’. In As if We Were Catching a Cobra (2012) she looks at the art of cartoon and other politically inspired art forms, in Egypt and Syria, immediately before the start of the revolution in Cairo. She uses documentary as a weapon, she says, because it is necessary to negotiate the oppression and taboos in order to find an avenue for self-expression and dissidence. Women’s identity struggle and self-expression are addressed directly in her films, and there is an immense trust in her global spectators’ ability to empathise, as vocal and aural communication methods are explicitly used to express dissent.

Izza Génini: The Performance of Heritage in Moroccan Music Documentaries

This case study looks at a much overlooked and ignored filmmaker from Morocco, Izza Génini: the first woman to be truly dedicated to making documentaries in a country where documentaries were actively discouraged. Morocco’s political, economic, cultural and social devastation during the Years of Lead in the eighties determined censorship and prevented any sort of filmmaking for a long time. People were disappeared or killed by government spies, and production was at an all time low. It was moreover determined by an exceptionally strict censorship board. Nevertheless, as producer and director, since the eighties Génini has managed to make pertinent observations of celebratory aspects of her mixed culture. Her family is Jewish, and it is a hidden aspect of Moroccan society that a large contingency of Jewish people used to live peacefully side by side with the Moroccan Arabs. Through depictions of traditional music and dance, celebrating hidden customs, her films defy national timidity and homogeneity. She was the first woman to make documentaries in Morocco that were not sponsored by the state, and remained so until well into the nineties.