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Beur Is Beautiful
Coedited by Carrie Tarr and Richard Porton, Cineaste and ArteEast have published a special supplement of Cineaste magazine on contemporary beur cinema. This special issue offers an incisive overview of prominent motifs featured in films made by Maghrebi-French directors. Highlighting articles by leading scholars and critics, the supplement puts beur filmmaking in context by examining the continuing importance of the banlieue film, the legacy of the Algerian War in cinema, and movies revolving around “queer” Maghrebi-French protagonists. The supplement also includes a useful guide to bibliographical and film-related resources.
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New Prospects on Ambiguous Grounds: Turkish Cinema Now
ArteEast has teamed up with Altyazi monthly cinema magazine based in Istanbul to present a special issue on contemporary Turkish cinema, composed of essays that highlight significant tendencies and propose a broad picture to understand recent advents in Turkish cinema. Authored by the editorial board members of Altyazi, the essays offer a thematic and contextual framework on issues such as the new blockbusters, auteur filmmaking, the search for identity in city and province, the questions of nation and nationalism and film culture in contemporary Turkey. Altyazi’s special CinemaEast issue is the first extensive publication on new Turkish cinema put together by Turkish film critics for international festival audiences.
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In the Clement Society of Cinema: Between the ardor of militants and passions of aesthetes, a visit to the golden era of ciné-clubs in the Arab world
A special issue of ArteEast’s online magazine ArteNews, edited by Daikha Dridi and Rasha Salti
A mere 30 or 40 years ago, the passion for noncommercial cinema and the yearning for critical engagement with art and culture inspired the formation of ciné-clubs throughout the Arab world. These cultural spaces drew significant membership and transformed into vivacious realms of free and open dialogue with world cinema and politically engaged art. As autocratic regimes strengthened their iron grip on freedom of expression, political pluralism and subversion, ciné-clubs became regarded as renegade loci for dissent. They were either forcibly shut down by governments or voluntarily disbanded by their instigators, lest they be co-opted. These ciné-clubs played a key role in introducing generations of filmmakers to the works of masters such as Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Antonioni, Fellini and Godard, to name a few. They also played a key role in shaping the political identity of generations of cinephiles. This special issue of ArteNews is dedicated to unearthing the memory of these informal institutions whose history has received almost no attention. It also pays homage to those behind these magnificient ventures.
The issue includes texts from filmmakers Nadia Kamel (Cairo) and Nigol Bezjian (Aleppo) and writers Omar Zelig (Algiers) and Raja Shehadeh (Ramallah), plus interviews with ciné-club founders Omar Amiralay (Damascus), Aziz Mihrab (Casablanca), Jean-Pierre Goux Pelletan (Beirut), Walid Chmeit (Beirut), Chafia Djemame (Istanbul), Said Benmerad (Algiers) and Mustapha Darwish (Cairo), as well as filmmakers Mohammed Chrif Tribak (Morocco) and Moncef Dhouib (Tunis), among others.
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