Zeina Toutounji-Gauvard

94.1FM 3WBC – Egypt Australia Radio Show [ EARS ] with Jerry Guirguis interviewing Zeina Toutounji-Gauvard,

Relations presse cinéma France et monde arabe, Sunday 20 May 2021.

Hi and Welcome Zeina,

Listen to interview now [ https://drive.google.com/file/d/16jSWqfW9x4BLd6sTtpD02Ntx8SkWxgRh/view?usp=sharing ]

GABES CINEMA FEN is an annual festival where cinema, video art and virtual reality come together and interact.

A celebration of culture off the beaten track, meant to be a space for reflection around Arab cinema and the place it occupies on the map: questioning self-representation, as well as the fantasies and visions projected onto our societies.

The porosity of borders between the arts, the hybridization at work in the different artistic practices naturally led us to initiate a common reflection on all image expressions.

Our commitment to the city of Gabes Deserted by cultural players, the only maritime oasis in the Mediterranean enjoys a tranquillity that elevates it to the rank of ideal interval for taking the time for dialogue and meeting.

It is in this sense that the festival wishes to lay its foundations and boost the potential of this region, its injured youth, and to initiate the project of a lasting cultural activity.

Art will invade the city, its halls, cafes, centers, and its coast road. The goal is to forge links and affinities between the festival and the people of Gabes.

CINEMA

Gabes Cinema Fen showcases films that give free rein to the imagination or illuminate a fragment of reality.

The films in competition are exclusively Arab productions. This orientation stems from our belief that Arab films should first be seen by Arab audiences, as the circulation of these films is still very confidential within the various Arab countries.

3 Competitive Sections

1. Arab fiction feature films, essay films and experimental films

2. Arab documentary films

3. Arabic fiction, documentary and experimental short films

The parallel sections are windows on varied film proposals, sometimes in the minority, but always demanding and unique in their ways of inviting us to experience the world:

• Ciné-terre: Focus on the environment. With its phosphate industries, Gabes is one of the most polluted cities on the African continent.

• World cinema

• A retrospective of Algerian director and screenwriter, Tariq TEGUIA.

• Cinema for children

• Tunisian short films

• Outdoor screenings

• Master class

Workshops: Cinema and Thought

PANEL

The Panel, the very heart of the festival, is organized every year around the general theme of identity and representation in Arab cinemas.

This year the theme is: Recognition and Legitimation To create a dialogue between cinema and thought is our horizon in this section of the festival that we are conducting this year in a formula that we want temporary, experimental and necessarily unfinished: For three days, stakeholders in the field of cinema and academics will be invited to a common reflection on issues of cinema and their historical, political and philosophical extensions.

This year, we have chosen to debate a question that starts from observations which, due to their permanence, become problematic and open further reflection: The reception of Arab films in the legitimizing bodies -the international film festivals- and the almost obsessive quest for recognition that results from it among Arab filmmakers.

This position is at first sight legitimate (and not necessarily limited to Arab filmmakers) but it implies allegiance to a "Center" perceived as powerful, "knowing", legitimizing and ultimately imposing a certain Cinema. That of discourse, of "cultural anchoring", of political testimony.

A Cinema "reflection" of this Orient as we would like to see it and represent it to ourselves, a Cinema of identity assignment that evacuates art side from the principle of any filmic work.

The corollary of this symbolic power of legitimization is the internalization (conscious or unconscious) by the filmmakers from here of an implicit specification that ends up perpetuating a message and a form in congruence with the expectations expressed by the omniscient and

legitimizing bodies that are the major film festivals.

It is not a question of making a generalization that would be unfair to certain festivals and a certain Arab Cinema, less so giving in to "conspiracy" paranoia, but rather of pointing out a tendency that seems to us, due to its persistence over time, to have induced a "formatting" of filmic forms.

Our ambition is to debate this "naturalized" and "undisputed" power of legitimization and the expression of "the demand for recognition that it encloses", to explore what is at the root of it and what follows from it in terms of political, historical and cultural stakes through a triple prism:

- Decolonial and post-colonial studies

- Aesthetics and art theory

- Cultural History

CRITICAL WORKSHOP

Writing about a film is ideally an act of generosity, where emotions translated into a proposition of meaning are offered and shared.

From a more political perspective, film criticism is also an act of authority, of taste, knowledge, and ideology, therefore it also operates as an instance of legitimization in contexts where it is perceived as legitimate.

A somewhat cavalier history of the writings on Cinema in Tunisia highlights its atomization, its discretion, and the little credit it has always enjoyed both with potential audiences of films and filmmakers. There have been, and there will always be, in Tunisia brilliant pens but never an active institution. This lack of legitimacy could be explained by the difficulty that film criticism has always had to situate itself between academic criticism, which produces in the best of cases a soulless scholarly commentary, and a hegemonic "cultural" journalism whose impressionistic "papers" manage, at best, to grasp the thematic issues of a film.

This failure of criticism explains and participates, in its own way, in this perpetual quest for recognition by the Other that inhabits producers and directors at the origin of many misunderstandings and impostures, as well as their systematic aversion to any aesthetic judgment coming from "HERE" if it is not laudatory.

Based on these observations, our ambition through this workshop is to bring our contribution (as minor as it may be) to the emergence of new writers animated by the love of Cinema and driven by the desire to write. Beyond writing, this workshop also aims to be a place of reflection on the present and the future of cinema.

This workshop will be co-directed by Dork Zabunyan, Philosopher and Professor of Cinema (for the French and English part), and by Ali Adawi, critic and historian of Cinema (for the Arabic and English part).

This workshop will bring together ten participants selected by the mentors from among young journalists, researchers and students who have already written about cinema.

VIDEO ART

EL KAZMA is the Fen ("art" in Arabic) part of the Gabes Cinema Fen festival.

El Kazma, named after the Gabes casemate, is an annual video art meeting organized by La Boîte - a structure for the support, dissemination and mediation of contemporary art in Tunisia. Under the artistic direction of Malek Gnaoui, visual artist, each edition of the festival gives a “carte blanche” to a curator. The 2021 edition will be associated with Laurent Montaron.

Videos are shown in containers on the Corniche de Gabes, as well as in cafes in the city. They are also the subject of mediation work carried out by the students of the Higher Institute of Arts & Crafts of Gabes, with the complicity of their teacher and artist Mohamed Amine Hamouda.

Also, on the program:

- Masterclass Ismail Bahri & Lola González (to be confirmed)

- Talk with Philippe-Alain Michaud, art historian, curator at the Center Pompidou, in charge of the film collection.

- Round table with Paul Ardenne, conference on the theme of “putting life into images, still”.

K OFF is a new section dedicated to young emerging Tunisian video artists.

Thank You

Jerry Guirguis

Presenter

94.1FM 3WBC

Egypt Australia Radio Show [ EARS ]

Mobile 0400 718 817

Jerry.Guirguis@gmail.com

94.1FM Jerry Guirguis (google.com) [ https://sites.google.com/view/941fmwithjerryguirguis ]