2021 Festival Panel
Arab/Futurism: Speculative Storytelling in Arab cinema
Date: May 29
Time: 4PM EST FREE EVENT |
Abstract: In the past decades, we have witnessed a new wave of Arab cinema, deeply grounded in the realities and politics of everyday life in the Arab world and its disparate diasporas. More recently, Arab filmmakers have experimented more with alternative genres and modes of storytelling. While certainly popularized by the proliferation of Western culture, speculative fiction - fantasy, science fiction and magic realism - are not a foregin form of storytelling in the Arab world. The Arab world has a very rich history of fantasy, sci-fi and magic realism particularly in literature as early as the 9th century, with the early stories of A Thousand and One Nights.
These genres, and by extension, the stories they portray, have proved both timeless and timely. Can Arab cinema translate this success into film? Is there an appetite from an audience perspective, are funding bodies amenable to funding these genres, and are filmmakers being exposed and trained in making these genre-specific films? This panel will delve into the advantages and challenges of adopting these genres in storytelling, particularly in cinema. How can filmmakers rethink stories they want to tell within this lens? Is there an advantage to approaching political, social and cultural stories from a genre angle, as opposed to dealing with them head on? Instead of looking and examining only our immediate present and our recent tumultuous past, should we be rethinking, reconfiguring, and restructuring how we tell stories? Speakers:
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Desirée Custers is a writer, researcher, and translator of Arabic literature. Her translations from Arabic to Dutch have appeared in poetry magazines and cultural platforms in Belgium, and in 2019 she translated the novel Brusselse Vrouwen ('Women of Brussels') by the Palestinian author Nisma Alaklouk. For her masters' degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies, Desiree submitted a thesis on Arabic science fiction with the title Arabic science fiction as vehicle for criticism, in which she focused on the novel Harb al-Kalb al-Thaniyyah ('Dog War II', 2018) by Palestinian/Jordanian author Ibrahim Nasrallah. The thesis was short-listed for the Flemish thesis prize in 2019. Desiree writes about Arab sci-fi and literary and cultural topics on her bi-lingual Arabic/English blog (https://issabramil.wordpress.com/). She also holds an M.A. in Conflict Studies and Human Rights from Utrecht University, the Netherlands.
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Nehal El-Hadi is a writer, researcher and editor. She investigates the relationships between the body (racialised, gendered), place (urban, virtual), and technology (internet, health). She completed her Ph.D. in Planning at the University of Toronto, where her research examined the relationships between user-generated content and everyday public urban life. She wrote the short film Blaxites (2019), one of a trilogy of short films produced by Queens University's Screening Surveillance Series. Her writing has appeared in academic journals, general scholarship publications, literary magazines, and is forthcoming in several anthologies and edited collections. Nehal is the Science+Technology Editor at The
Conversation Canada, an academic news site, and Editor-in-Chief of Studio Magazine, a biannual print publication dedicated to contemporary craft and design. |
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Ayham Jabr is a Surreal Collage Artist, a Video Editor, a Videographer and a Graphic Designer. He studied Electronics at Damascus University, and lives in Damascus, Syria. His love for science fiction films, stories, and theories are a main source of inspiration behind his primarily digital art works.
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