Ten Nights in Tunisia: Les Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage

Up until the digging of the Suez Canal, Africa and Asia were one physically linked continent. The Maghrib (in Arabic, literally the "West") has always been a meeting place for the various cultures of sub-Saharan Africa and the Eastern part of the Arab world, the Mashriq. Taking place in Tunisia since , the Carthage Film Festival has served as a contemporary meeting ground for the cultures of the Arab world and the diverse cultures and peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. Although the Carthage Film Festival in its beginning was inspired by Third Worldist ideology, crystallized in defiant declarations and manifestos calling for a revolutionary and anticolonial cinema, innovative in both political and esthetic terms, it has gradually evolved into a much less revolutionary forum. The festival, like the postcolonial films it now features, takes place in a context of religious tensions and class frustrations in a post-independence era dominated by global mass media and neoliberalism. The most pronounced critique of the Third World national revolution, this time from the Left, is found in Mohamed Chouikh's Youcef, Or the Legend of the Seventh Sleeper, whose protagonist, Youcef, escapes from an asylum into what he believes to be Algeria in , a world where the FLN is heroically battling French armies. A surreal time gap between Youcef 's subjective perception and present-day Algeria becomes a satirical device for underlining the minimal progress in the life of the Algerian people since independence in. Yesterday's heroes, Youcef soon learns, are today's oppressors, ready to sacrifice anyone who opposes their regime, including their old FLN comrades. Insanity no longer resides in an individual but in a social system. Bab El-Oued City, by another key Algerian filmmaker, Merzak Allouache, also foregrounds the conflicts ripping apart the contemporary nation. Revealing the historic working-class neighborhood at the heart of Algiers Review of Tunisia's Carthage Film/Video Festival, published in Cineaste, Vol. , No. , .

2011

This article analyses the efforts of a local film festival to bridge the cultures north and south of the Mediterranean by bringing North African film to Marseille. Marseille’s distance from national broadcast culture underscores the city as an unlikely host for an integrative media event, but allows for an examination of how the small scale of the community film festival provides an important counterpoint to the national thrust of the broadcast media event. Such festivals are non-broadcast media events. They are local, face-to-face, and immediate (i.e., live in a non-broadcast sense). They constitute a form of ‘slow media’, several days of physical presence in the theatre, focused viewing, and shared public discussion between film-makers and audiences. As such, the ethnocultural film festival is a media happening that strives to interrupt the continuous broadcast of official media events that picture the lives of minority communities in ways that run counter to their experience and understanding of them.

Kodwo Eshun and Ros Gray (ed.), "The Militant Image : A Ciné Geography", Third Text, 2011. , 2011

French Cultural Studies, 2010

This article proposes an examination of French approaches to cultural analysis as a framework for an assessment of the participation of the audience and its engagement in the reception of the first Tunisian Film Festival that took place in Paris in March 2008. It starts with a short description of the objectives of a strong tradition in French sociology of culture that has sought to understand the articulation of social class with cultural practices through the examination of the patterns of behaviour of individuals, a tradition that has neglected the diasporic dimension. The objective of the article is to examine the place and forms of 'the national' in the audience's response to the festival taking place in a diasporic context and in a transnational film economy. An analysis of the responses to an informal questionnaire highlights the ways in which the audience participates and engages, without any apparent contradiction, both in the values traditionally associated with film culture in France and in a strong attachment to Tunisian films that have not always been valorised in the same film culture.

Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 2006

and Zimbabwe, with a dozen shorts and a mix of documentaries and features, and the new inclusion of North African work, the fare this year was exciting. Retrospectives of two talented, individualistic Cameroonian directors-Jean-Marie Téno and Jean-Pierre Bekolo-were screened. As a "Best of African Film Festival" spinoff held at BAM, Téno's Colonial Misunderstanding (CM/FR/DE, 2004),

Journal of African Cinemas, 2013

Cinéma et Patrimoine: Manifestations et Fonctionnement, 2016

From the train sequence of the brothers Lumière to the three dimensional movies of nowadays, the seventh art's masterpieces have never ceased to be a mirror which reflects many rituals, traditions and customs of different international cultures. In addition to being a mean of communication with the audience, most of the filmmakers do their utmost to make their movies into something that represents their identity, their origin and their habits. The directors, through their films, reveal, in tangible or immaterial ways, the glamour of their country and display their pride of belonging to their motherland. By taking into consideration the international propagation, which may be done via a movie, according to its application in international cinema festivals, the directors may also use their masterpieces as a tourism campaign; either through the choice of traditional costumes worn by the performers, or by selecting shooting plans, characterized by historical or identity architecture, or by shooting a religious or customs ritual. Through this essay, and by studying the case of the Tunisian movie Halfaouine, I will try to analyze how the cinema can reflect an identity, making it eligible for the nomination: The Seventh Art as National Heritage Préservation.