Daikha Dridi interviews Mustafa Darwish, judge by profession and occasional film critic, a veteran founder of ciné-clubs in Cairo, who once held the position of censor. Until this day, Mustafa Darwish remains a critic and judge of cinema. In the 1960s, off and on, he was the very atypical director of the censorship unit at […]
I have never fully experienced silence until Antarctica. Having isolated myself from the group I was with, I came to realize that I could hear absolutely nothing. The sense of stillness in itself was at once peaceful and overwhelming. One’s natural instincts are to strain to hear, to find some sound that is familiar, but […]
The “Olympic Garden” is a 7 minute long 3-channel loop of still photographs, text & sound. Script: Channel B Located behind ‘The Egyptian Olympic Centre’, on the amorphous line separating the upper middle class neighborhood of New Maadi and the Arab Al-Basateen informal area, ‘The Olympic Centre Garden’ has come to replace ’Al-Ahram Coop Complex’, […]
Chawki Amari is a celebrated columnist and cartoonist at the al-Watan newspaper in Algeria. Omar Amiralay is a veteran Syrian filmmaker and founding member of the Damascus Ciné-club. Writer, producer and director Nigol Bezjian was born in Aleppo, graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York and UCLA Film and Television. He has […]
Photography by Ehsan Maleki During the 1970s and the 1980s the Ba‘athist [alternative spelling is Ba‘thist] regime in Iraq displaced massively villagers in the northern region of Kurdistan from mountainous areas down to the valleys. The Iraqi government designed mujamma‘a or Collective Towns where these displaced populations were relocated. The planning of these Collective Towns initially responded to […]
Tuning Baghdad brings together a growing archive of live video performances, audio clips and historical information on Iraqi Jewish musicians and the music scene that was displaced from Baghdad in the late 1940s. As an alternative to making a linear documentary film, the website features four video chapters along with relevant audio and textual links […]
The Odyssey is traditionally considered the founding pillar of Western Literature. We are taught that Odysseus’ heroic deeds are to be emulated, his hubris to be shunned. However, perhaps Odysseus is not the hero he is presented to be. Harold Bloom notes that Odysseus is a “universal figure,” and that “no Western literary character […]
Colonial-era governor of Quelimane, Avenue Patrice Lumumba, Quelimane, Mozambique, 2008 ©Guy Tillim. Courtesy of STEVENSON, Cape Town and Johannesburg. Once a street photographer who sought to capture the violence of the moment in African cities like Johannesburg, Guy Tillim now seeks the richer, more muted tensions of the lull between: the suspended pause of the […]
The various mass-displacements that have happened in the 20th century have led to the much popular genre of diasporic memoir. In cases where the author of the memoir is female and Muslim, this genre has converged with that of the female coming of age, or emancipatory novel to produce that very lucrative industry of women’s […]
With my research proposal in one hand and oud in the other, I felt that I was prepared for fieldwork in Syria. What I was not prepared for was a common response to my stated research interests in Arab music: Is there even such a thing as “Arab music”? While many Syrians expressed surprise […]