منذ 8 أشهر
NAAS’ first Research Fellowship was organized as a 6-months-program supporting researchers, curators, and cultural practitioners engaging critically with cinema, media, and visual culture across the Arabic-speaking region and its diasporas. It was elaborated in partnership with Esmat Publishing List (Egypt).
The NAAS x Esmat Publishing List Research Fellowship 2022 program welcomes fellows interested in exhibition and circulation of independent film, network-building, peer-to-peer value exchange, distributed governance and radical organizational models.
It encourages them to articulate capacities and/or practices they have shaped and carried out through their communal engagements into well-standing methodologies and theories that can capture the realities of their lived experiences and act as an action plan for new social and economic configurations.
Between July and December 2022, fellows participated in monthly 3-hour group sessions with visiting guests. The aim of these sessions is to provide a critical learning space for fellows to exchange, learn and test their ideas and methods, weaving an intersectional and transnational web of fellows in close contact with each other’s research trajectories through direct engagement with the diverse institutional structures and practices of alternative cinema screens in the Arabic-speaking region.
The finalists have been selected out of 100 applicants with the help of a selection committee composed of NAAS staff, Nour El Safoury (Researcher and Film Critic, Egypt), and NAAS members, including Laila Aoudj (Dima Cinema, Algeria), Alia Arasoughly (Shashat Women Cinema, Palestine), and Kais Zaied (Cinemadart, Tunisia).
We are delighted to introduce you to the seven 2022 fellows and their projects:
Reman Sadani
Moving image artist and writer
Article: Magnetic Memories: How to Mend that Which Has Been Ruptured?
Ahmed Tag
Filmmaker and photographer
Article: قنا: أين تذهب هذا المساء حيث لا مكان؟
Valentina Villani
Researcher and cultural practitioner
Article: Issues and Challenges Regarding the Local Distribution of Egyptian Independent Cinema
Farah Hallaba
Anthropologist and visual ethnographer
Article: On Positionality and Filmmaking: The ‘Me’ in the Story
Farag El Selliny
Cultural practitioner and cinema researcher
Article: ملاحظات من وحي مجموعة مقابلات مع مخرجين وعاملين وعاملات بالمجال السينمائي في ليبيا
Iskandar Abdallah
Researcher and cinema programmer
Article: Hijacking Absence: On Queer Viewing Practices of Arab Films
Basil Al Subee
Researcher and writer
Article: Poetics of Historical Contemplatin With Syria and its Diaspora: An Interview with Hala Alabdalla
This fellowship resulted in a Malaffat’s dossier, called Cinema’s Infrastructures: Interpersonal Points of Departure, edited by researcher Nour El Safoury (Esmat—Publishing List). It includes the fellowers’ contributions in English and Arabic.
Each essay in this series taps into its writer’s lived experience and shows how cinema is part of it. By putting these realities in proximity, a drawing of the different forms of life that surround, or could surround cinema transpires. This drawing can then guide efforts to reorganize, or organize, the present infrastructure of cinema. – Nour El Safoury, researcher and editor of the Dossier 3 of Malaffat.
Malaffat is a platform by the Network of Arab Alternative Screens (NAAS, Lebanon), dedicated to publishing, preserving, and documenting narratives and lived experiences around cinema culture. "Malaffat Dossiers” is a series of curated collections of contributions that aims to explore the histories, challenges, and practices shaping cinema in our region and regions of affinity.
Read Dossier 3 of Malaffat. Follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
