Mapping Arab

Documentary
 Mapping Arab
Documentary

This publication was

possible thanks to ‫ﺗﻢ اﻟﻨﺸﺮ ﺑﺪﻋﻢ ﻣﻦ‬
About this Publication Contents
This is the initial outcome of a greater study & scan entitled Data is Beautiful. It is part of
a project co-financed with the support of Transformation Partnership from the Ministry of Foreword 5
Foreign Affairs in Germany, International Media Support and the Ford Foundation.

Methodology for Data 6

Collection and Analysis
Editorial Team (Alphabetically)
Concept Development Claudia Jubeh, Diana El Jeiroudi, Guevara Namer, Marion Schmidt Mapping Arab Documentary 10
Coordination & Research Claudia Jubeh Yasmine Haj
Additional Research Anne Kierkegaard, Claudia Paterson, Nawras Ali, Nihal Zaghloul
Film Listing Verification Committee Guevara Namer, Irit Neidhardt, Tue Steen Müller
Data Entry & Initial Analysis Nihal Zaghloul On Arab Documentaries 25
Analysis of Data Claudia Jubeh, Diana El Jeiroudi, Saleem Albeik, Yasmine Haj Yasmine Haj
Essays by Irit Neidhardt, Nadim Jarjoura, Saleem Albeik, Viola Shafik, Yasmine Haj
Arabic Iskandar Ahmad Abdallah, Yasmine Haj, Lamia Sahili, Usama Ghanoum
English Claudia Paterson, Sarah Godfrey Verification Committee 28
German Lingoking GmbH
Design, Layout, Infographics (development/illustration) Fadi Abdelnour, Subtype.Studio
Thanks to Azza Chaabouni, Emily Dische-Becker, Fadoua Maroub, Guevara Namer, and The Films 30
Marion Schmidt for extending help and guidance.

The Documentary and the Arab: 33

On Fictionalization and Emancipation
Irit Neidhardt

Imprint
Mapping Arab Docs 2015-2016   The Aesthetics of Animation 47
© 2017  DOX BOX e.V.
Turmstr. 70, 10551 Berlin, Germany in Arab Documentary Filmmaking
www.dox-box.org Nadim Jarjoura

From Agitprop and Expository 53

VR33450B, Amtsgericht Charlottenburg Observation to Dissident Subjectivity?
Represented by Andrea Kuhn, Hicham Falah, Mikael Opstrup & Vrej Boyajian
General Manager Diana El Jeiroudi The Arab Documentary before and
after the Arab Uprising
Viola Shafik
Foreword
Dear Reader,
You are holding now the very first edition of Mapping Arab Documentary. This will be a
first of a series of studies to follow by DOX BOX within the quest to investigate the state
of arab documentary landscape.  We aim at promoting spatial thinking and historical
inquiry about the relations between public infrastructure, social geography, collective
memory, cultural networks, and economic development.

Mapping Arab Documentary, challenges perceptions and assumptions by offering

facts, but also challenges facts by including what experts attribute as common sense, a
certainty or a given. This is how we approached the analysis and data visualisation. We
wanted to investigate what we often hear of, such as the lack of female directors, the
predominantly male-gaze in topics, that countries of idle-cinema, the European films
financing based on topics … etc.

The idea behind Mapping Arab Documentary came about from the need to fill a gap of
knowledge resulting from the absence of information and verified data. We wanted to
reach first a listing of all documentary films made by Arab-world filmmakers to get a
sense of the volume of the landscape before we embark on a multi-year research and
project. As the research started and the initial findings emerged, an inevitable need
to make sense of such data, came about, accompanied by interesting findings and
eye-opening facts.  These enriching and invaluable knowledge, we want to share with
you, as you plan and make decisions in your next film production, film support and
financing, film distribution, film education, film investment or your next study.

Mapping Arab Documentary is a first tool to discover, document and explore the chang-
ing landscapes and environment in which not only films, as products, are made, but a
tool as well to discover the reality in which filmmakers, film activists, film scholars and
film financiers do all operate and intersect. The aim is as always, to inform decisions
and practice for every operator and every practitioner in the field of documentary with
a better vision and a deeper knowledge.  

Before we leave you to this read, we’d like to specifically thank all filmmakers and film
right-holders for their contribution and collaboration, all project assistants and volun-
teers, and last but not least our supporters who made this possible.

We wish you a good read.

Sincerely,
Diana El Jeiroudi

7
 Methodology for Data
Collection and Analysis
This study only examined the independent documentary film scene, and films that were
made by filmmakers from the Arab world, and that were released in 2015 and 2016.
The information was first collected using in-house desk research (mainly online,
from festival websites and catalogues, and from film institutions, funds, and cultural
events).  Additional research was done by external researchers to cross-examine data
and allow for broader sources of information.
Most of the study was dedicated to films, i.e. the products, and another review was
later conducted around the main crew members of a film (being the directors, the pro-
ducers, the cinematographers, and the editors). 
For films, the study examined only films that had their premieres in 2015 or 2016,
meaning their first appearance in a public renowned regional or international screening
(such as acclaimed festivals).  In total, 111 films were identified, with 52 released in 2015
and 59 in 2016.
The study included films that satisfied the criteria of being independent by directors
hailing from the Arab world, i.e. from the 22 states of the Arab league including ethnic mi-
norities, bi-nationals and diasporic or exiled filmmakers.  The study examined documen-
tary films of all documentary sub-genres including hybrid and animated documentaries.
Films were categorised for the purpose of this study into three categories: feature
length films (more than 70 minutes), medium length films (between 31 – 69 minutes)
and short form films (between 1-30 minutes).  
For crew members, the review aimed at soliciting additional information with regards to
directors’ education, experience, residence, nationality and other limited correlating fac-
tors. In addition, some information was also gathered around other main crew members.  rights-holder.  However, as information on films is public knowledge, the data about the
Data was subject to a two-step verification process. The first was by contacting and
verifying information as updated and accurate directly with rightsholders. The second
was by recruiting a voluntary external committee of experts in Arab film and documen-
taries to review all listings and data.
Once the data was verified, the project team started to bring in initial findings with
indicative figures and charts which allowed the analysis to emerge. The analysis was a
combined effort between the in-house team, and the external writers Yasmine Haj and
Saleem Albeik, who examined the data and visuals and wrote their initial findings. These
8 9
texts were re-edited and discussed among the two writers and the in-house editorial
team. Their findings were edited into the analysis section and combined with data visual-
isation to provide an interesting read. Data visualisation was provided by Fadi Abdelnour.
Furthermore, we solicited essays on the state of Arab documentaries from scholars and
practitioners working in and around documentary films from the Arab world.  Three texts
have been added to this study and were written by the renowned film critic from Leba-
non, Nadim Jarjoura, the documentary film scholar and filmmaker from Egypt/Germany,
Viola Shafik, and the sales agent and scholar Irit Neidhardt from Germany. These texts are
intended to give general context by experts in the field from different perspectives.
Disclaimer & Exclusion for Film Listing 2015-2016
Only films with sufficient information on the crew and contact person are included
in the listing.
This study was aimed at the independent documentary film scene. Non-independent
films were excluded, such as commercially commissioned films.
Despite the continuous efforts to verify all information and expand the coverage of
study to be as inclusive as possible, some documentary films satisfying the study area
and focus might have been missed due to human error or inaccessible information, or
lack of information.
Apart from the world premiere, up to 5 festival participatants and up to 5 awards were
included in the listing per film.
Rightsholders have the right to object to the inclusion of their film in the listing.  
For 2015 – 2016, one film was excluded from the film listing upon request of its
film was examined and included in the study (statistics & analysis).
Incomplete or unverified information on Budget & Financing is noted as such.
This study only included the documentary film genre.  The listing does not include films
that are from video-art or fiction even if they apply some documentary elements. For
that the verification committee was recruited to examine any film cases that needed
judgment. As long as films were not repeatedly classified as documentaries by the
international documentary film industry (such as the verification committee and the
international acclaimed festivals), these films were excluded from this study.
 Mapping Arab Documentary
Yasmine Haj
Introduction
This study reviews a total of 111 documentary films released in the years 2015 and 2016,
and the crews behind these films. It specifically targets information and data collected
around the country of production, the locations of shooting, and the release.
In terms of film crews, the data collected was centered around the composition of the
crew members, specifically the director, the producer, the cinematographer or director
of photography, and the editor.
The study also examines the films with regards to topics and the makeup of their crews.
Whilst examining this, special attention is given to the diversity within crews, in correla-
tion with their gendered or non-gendered makeup, their nationalities, their educational
background, and if any of these factors relate in any way to the topics and locations.
Film topics are offered a focal dimension for the study, tracing possible patterns and
possible ties with geographic and social contexts. In addition, we tried to trace and analyse
factors tied to film financing, festival cycles, and premiere geography when reviewing the
listing of films released in the past two years.
This analysis attempts to tackle documentary films, each as an independent product
with its own lifecycle, and its reception by the public or within the industry. For such, we
explore films as artistic products, examining their genre, running-time, and other revela-
tory qualities. Thus, this review probes a variety of topics and contexts explored in Arab
documentary films, as they range from war and conflict, to politics, to immigration, to arts
and culture, to poverty, to gender struggles, and how all of these relate to their makers
and geographical setting.
Arab Docs Are Diversified
As can be observed from the data collected in this study, Arab documentary filmmakers
share a diversity of backgrounds, languages, and location of filming, either within their
native country of birth or abroad, and they use a wide assortment of styles and themes.
Notably, they reside in a variety of different countries, both in their native countries within
the Arab world and abroad; some hold simultaneously two nationality or citizenships. The
films they make also range in terms of languages, from Arabic, to Kurdish, to Armenian,
to Tamazight, to Wolof, to French, and to English.
However, upon screening the collected data and statistics of Arab documentary films
made in 2015 and 2016, three points stand out. Firstly, a large number of the directors of
the reviewed films reside outside of their country of origin when compared to the ones
12
living in their own country of origin (at the time of conducting this study). Secondly, a re-
markable percentage of the directors are female. Thirdly, and notably, a large percentage
of female directors are based abroad as opposed to male directors, whose vast majority
are based inside Arab countries.
On The Geography (Films Vs. Directors)
The study shows that more than one third of the directors of the reviewed films reside
abroad at the time of conducting the research. When looking at the number of directors
filming in their country of residence, three country stand out and these are Egypt, Leba-
non, and Morocco. These countries had the highest percentage of films made by directors
residing in the country. On that note, hardly any directors who do not live in Egypt make
films there. This is to say, only Egyptian or Egypt-based filmmakers make documentaries
with shooting locations in Egypt. On the other side of the spectrum, the majority of Syrian
directors who shot their films in Syria or about Syria, live abroad.
A vast majority of directors residing outside the Arab world are based in France, fol-
lowed by a percentage residing in a northern or a western European country or in Canada.
Syrian directors make up the majority of directors living abroad, followed by directors
from Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. On a final note, all directors who have filmed in the
United Arab Emirates and in Qatar are residents in their own countries of origin at the
time of collecting this data.
A Closer Look On Female Directors
Around 60% of the overall number of Arab directors are male directors, and around 40%
are female directors. When examining films with a shooting location in one or more Arab
country, there are fewer female directors residing there compared with their male coun-
terparts. In these cases, the female directors are mostly based abroad. When examining
the number of directors based abroad, the gender balance is roughly the same – 44%
female to 46% male directors. Out of the total 46 directors based abroad, 20 are female
and 26 are male directors.
However, when examining if gender plays a factor in directors residing abroad, the
percentage suggests a dismissal of any gender factor. The percentage of directors living
abroad is roughly comparable, as almost 45% of female directors and roughly 40% of the
male directors live abroad. In that respect, Lebanon’s female directors form the majority
of the female filmmakers living abroad, with 4 out of 10 female directors living abroad
(mainly in France and Canada). However, it is also true that Morocco and Lebanon have
the highest percentage of female directors residing in their own country of origin.
When looking at films made by female directors in their own countries, Lebanese,
Egyptian, Moroccan, and Tunisian female directors have the highest percentage of those
13
 filming in their own countries of origin. Lebanon & Egypt stand out as special cases. In
Lebanon, the major percentage of films are made by female directors who are based in
Lebanon, while a smaller percentage are mainly based in France or Canada. On a final
note, the majority of directors shooting their films in their country of residence come
mainly from Egypt or Lebanon, male and female alike.

A Closer Look On Crews

Most crews working on films released in the years 2015 and 2016 were quite diverse in
terms of gender and national background or residency. Upon examining the given data,
and when examining the rest of the crew (excluding the director), there is evident gen-
der diversity among the crew members. Out of the 111 films, the crews of more than 60
films consisted of a combination of male and female crew members (more than 54%).
However, approximately 38% of crews consisted of male-only members. In addition, a
considerable percentage (around 23%) of films made by male directors had male-only
crews, while female directors had more diverse crews. 32 films made by female directors
had a mixed-gender crew, while only 9 were made by a female-only crew. The study could
not trace the reasons behind such uneven gender diversity within teams as no further
investigation was made. Therefore, this information cannot lead to an analysis.

Geographic diversity was less prevalent among the crews. In terms of residency, most
female and male directors are based in Egypt, Lebanon, France, Germany, and Morocco,
which happen to be the same countries which either funded or produced, or both funded
and produced, most of the films. In such cases, directors in these countries collaborated
with a crew made of similar national backgrounds (in terms of nationality or residence).

Some of the most homogenous crews in terms of national background were those
formed by Egypt-based directors. In Egypt, 11 of the films released in 2015 and 2016 were
made by an entirely Egyptian or Egypt-based crew, while only one film had a non-Egyptian
or non-Egypt based crew member.

A similar case is present elsewhere to a lesser extent. In Lebanon, 9 films were made
with an entirely Lebanese or Lebanon-based crew, as opposed to 3 films with crew mem-
bers from different countries. In Morocco, 6 films to 2. France had the largest number of
films made with entirely France-based crews (12 films with French crews as opposed to 4
nationality-diverse crews).

Collaborations
Most inter-country collaborations, should they have taken place, occured between direc-
tors and other crew members, and those were predominantly between France and North
African Arab countries, especially Tunisia and Algeria. Finally, most of the editors (63%)
live outside the Arab world and they include a majority of editors who do not hail from
the Arab world. This shows that a majority of the Arab-world documentaries are edited

16
 by non-Arab editors. Of the 111 films, a few films (20 films) were a one-man or one-woman
show, wherein the director was responsible for the cinematography, the editing, and the
production aspects of the film. Other films still had the director fill in for another role or
more, for example, the director acts as the producer of their own film as well.

More than half of the films (51% of the total) were directed and produced by the same
person (57 films out of 111), as opposed to (54 films) which had a director and a producer
or more. Also notably, many directors acted as cinematographers of their own films, with
a total of 46 films made as such, as opposed to 65 films which had a cinematographer or
cameraperson or more beside the director. Editing was mostly done by an editor rather
than the director, with only 32 films edited by their directors as opposed to 79 films edited
by an editor other than the director him/herself.

A Closer Look On Directors’ Education

In accordance with the national diversity found in each of the crews, or lack thereof, the
directors’ educational background appear to be as diverse in terms of regions and topics.
Of all the directors scanned in this study, 40% already had a film education. A considerable
number of directors, educated or not, had previous experience in directing documentary
films. 90 out of 111 films were made by directors with previous experience in filmmaking.
A smaller number of films were made by first-timers (21 out of 111), meaning directors who
were trying their hand at filmmaking for the first time.

The given data shows that the highest number of directors with cinematic or film edu-
cation were Lebanese, followed by Moroccan. Few Egyptian directors had film or cinematic
education, though most of them had formal education although not in film. With regards
to film education, the largest number of educated directors studied film in France. Most of
the directors who studied film in France came from Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Lebanon.
From the directors who released their films in 2015 and 2016, some had studied film in
Germany, most of whom originally came from Palestine and Syria.

On Financing
It was not possible to perform an executive study on financing. However, an examination
of film support programs and grants was collected. The financial support granted to Arab
documentaries released in the years 2015 and 2016 was not as diverse or varied. The fund-
ing came mainly from three financiers: The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), which is
registered in Switzerland with head offices in Lebanon, the Doha Film Institute in Qatar,
and the CNC (The French National Center for Cinema and Moving Pictures) in France. These
funds have granted money to or financed films shot mainly in Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco,
Syria, and Palestine. The CNC funded films were shot mainly in Egypt, Morocco, and Al-
geria. One interesting point to note is the emergence of crowdfunding in the Arab world,
with only one film made by a Lebanese female director, and on the topic of migration and
refugees, to be completely funded as such.

18
 Yasmine Haj  is a writer, editor,
The topics that were mostly supported included arts and culture, immigration, war and and translator.  She completed
conflict, and work. Some funds offered support to a diversity of themes and topics, such her Masters in comparative lit-
as AFAC which supported films released in 2015 and 2016 with topics ranging from arts and erature at the University of To-
culture, to immigration, to democracy, to history, to LGBTQ. Non-Arab funding institutions ronto, with a focus on modern
had a tendency to support films with topics concerning war, conflict and immigration. The
Arabic literature and French New
Doha Film Institute, on the other hand, funded films about immigration, arts and culture,
Wave cinema.  She is a co-found-
work, gender, and economy.
er of Dalaala Translations and
Exploring Topics & Genre has translated and transcribed a
The collected data on the 111 films released in 2015 and 2016 highlights an association number of film scripts and films,
between the nationality of directors and the topics of their films. Films by directors from as well as literary and non-lit-
the Middle Eastern Arab countries tackled topics around politics, wars, and migration, erary texts. She was a month-
while films by directors from North African Arab countries were more focused on the ex- ly contributor to the Palestine
ploration of social and governance issues, and films by directors from the Gulf peninsula supplement of Assafir Newspa-
were more centered around theoretical or historical topics, such as arts and culture and per, and her translations have
exploring religion and the environment. appeared in a number of maga-
zines, including Asymptote Mag-
Although some of these topics are less controversial, they still incorporated politics or azine and Specimen Press.
controversial or investigative approach. All across the reviewed films, many subtopics or
additional themes emerged, such as gender violence in the Egyptian Jeanne d’Arc,
whose Germany-based Egyptian director portrays female Egyptian artists who struggle Issues of war and/or direct politics, were made by more male directors based abroad
with their activism. Likewise, France-based Lebanese director Carlos Chahine explores his than female directors. Most female directors explored immigration, social issues, arts and
return from the diaspora through art in chekhov in Beirut, just as armed resistance culture, the environment, and history. Nevertheless, such topics were equally explored
is explored in another arts and culture film by Palestinian director Mohanad Yaqubi, in by male directors. Gender-themed films were also equally explored by female and male
its archival cinematic footage of exploration – Off Frame, or Revolution Until directors, where 2 films were made by Lebanese female and male directors, one by an
Victory. Similarly, France-based Tunisian director Hind Meddeb’s Tunisia Clash is an- Emirati female director, and another by a male Moroccan director. Only one film explored
other film that uses art to explore cultural resistance against oppressive states, mapping LGBTQ questions, and it was made by a Lebanese director based in Lebanon.
Tunisian rappers and rap as a form of defiance. To name a few, that is.
Genre
On the other hand, almost half of the directors based abroad have focused on questions The given data shows that the styles and genres of films varied as did their topics. With
of war, conflict, and immigration. 8 out of the 20 films concentrate on migration, with 4 overlapping genres and subgenres, most of the films were classified as “Portrait” films
films by Palestinian and 4 films by Lebanese directors. Films by Iraqi and Syrian directors (29 films), followed by a high number of “Author-driven” films (18 films), “Observational”
explored themes relating to war, with 11 out of the 16 films made about war. At the other (13 films), “Experimental” (11 films), and “Investigative” films (9). Portrait films tended to
end of the Mediterranean, films made by Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian directors were have longer, rather than shorter, running times. They were mostly supported by archive
focused on topics of immigration. Only a couple of the directors from this area of the material, investigative approaches, or observed a personal viewpoint or life event, begging
Mediterranean live abroad, as opposed to the many Syrian and Iraqi directors who live for broader spaces (and time) to explore those issues at length.
abroad. On the other hand, very few films made by directors based abroad explored social
and economic issues. These issues were mainly tackled by directors who are based in their
own country of origin. More Lebanese films were focused on arts and history as opposed
to their Middle Eastern neighbours, and it was a similar case for gulf country directors,
where the majority of films focused on arts, history, and the environment.

22 23
 Film Lifecycle
A final point of interest in this study was the lifecycle of a film after its release. However,
this review did allow for limited sources of information including premiers at major fes-
tivals and competition and awards.
Premieres and Festivals
Arab films released in 2015 and 2016 have premiered across 44 film festivals in total, 4 of
which were major international competitive festivals. Furthermore, the majority of Arab
documentary films premiered in Dubai International Film Festival and Berlin International
Film Festival, one of the international gateways for films.
18 films (out of the 111) premiered at the Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF), and
were shot mainly in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Algeria. Nonethe-
less, few of those explored themes besides the social and environmental subject matter.
Throughout the examined two years, 11 documentaries from the Arab world premiered at
the Berlinale, mainly as part of the “Forum Expanded” section. Few of the documentaries
premiered in the festival’s official competition or their panorama section. At the Berlinale,
however, there was a larger variety of topics explored compared with the DIFF, including
immigration, war and conflict, democracy, politics, and arts and culture.
Subsequently, a few documentaries screened at Locarno Film Festival (6 films), while
some premiered at FIDADOC (7 films), a Morocco-based film festival that has traditionally
been a platform for student film premieres.
Awards
The study observed a correlation between awards and films’ topic, whereby films on immi-
gration have reaped the largest number of awards, followed by films on war and conflict,
and equally followed by films on art and culture, work, poverty, and activism. With regards
to social and theory-based themes, films on history, gender, politics, and religion also
won a considerable number of awards, with gender being the theme that received most
of the awards out of all the aforementioned social themes.
With regards to shooting locations, films shot in Lebanon, Syria, Algeria, Iraq, and Egypt
reaped the largest number of awards in film festivals (28, 26, 23, 22, and 15 awards, re-
spectively). This correlation between shooting location and awards, relates to the existing
available financial support available for documentary films in these countries (with the
exception of Iraq and Syria, where funding is non-existent for documentaries). Moreover, 7
films released in 2015 and 2016 won a considerably large number of awards in addition to
international and local critical acclaim. Most important to note is the work of Iraqi-French
director Abbas Fahdel, Homeland: Iraq Year Zero with a running time of almost five
and half hours spanning pre-war life and its catastrophic aftermath, before and after the
war on Iraq. The film was awarded 11 awards according to the data collected and was crit-
26
ically acclaimed worldwide. Similarly, A Man Returned by Palestinian-Danish director
Mahdi Fleifel, Babor Casanova by Algerian-Swiss director Karim Sayyad, and We Have
Never Been Kids by Egyptian director Mahmood Soliman have all been highly successful
in their receipt of a significant number of awards and major critique, to name but a few.
Conclusion
“Photographs are a means for making “real” (or “more real”) matters that the priv-
ileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore.” 
— Susan Sontag
Films make a routine and break it. They help create new realities and shatter others, or
maintain them, if they so will. The moving picture is a powerful tool that imprints images
and ideas in real time in the minds of their viewers. When used in documentary format,
those gain further different reality from the reality they already portray. They open up
fields of engaging with as many themes and issues as possible, in a myriad of different and
often innovative ways. They layer reality not only with the lens, but also with its narration.
For the past few years, if not the past one hundred, the Arab world has been a centre
stage for wars, clashing politics, gender struggles, and socio-economic instability, but
also a platform for positive change in more ways than one. With documentaries serving
as reflections on and of the real world, Arab documentary filmmakers naturally mirror
such tumult in their stratification as does their filmmaking. It is no wonder then, that a
large percentage of filmmakers from Middle Eastern countries, saturated with wars and a
long history of violence and clashing interests, would use this “fertile” ground for docu-
mentary filmmaking on such topics. The same applies to filmmakers and films originating
from North African countries, a geography that was less affected by war per se but is still
suffering from the repercussions of previous (and perhaps contemporary forms of ) colo-
nisation and economic exploitation, be that internal or external. Thus the more popular
themes explored there tended to approach the social and cultural states found in those
countries, and focused on topics of social injustice, poverty and unemployment, as well
as aesthetic realms, such as arts and culture. The majority of films filmed in countries
that enjoyed more stable political states, and specifically the Gulf states, focused on more
theoretical topics that allowed for distance and the freedom to explore them without
being politically controversial.
There is an element of “redemptive” revelation in documentaries, whereby the “sins” or
“mistakes” of the past are atoned for in its present recuperation and examination, seeking
a more “heavenly” future perhaps. As such, the Arab world calls for heaps of that. In this
study, we have found a variety of ages and generations participating in the production
27
 and making of such platforms of change, or testing. The numbers varied between the 20, existing reality of discrimination and violence into an imagined and achievable reality
30, and 40 year-olds, with the percentage of those between the age of 30 and 45 being of transformation. In front of and in spite of the privileged. Telling them what they think,
the highest (50%). There was still a considerable percentage of filmmakers directing and and demanding a space to voice those thoughts, be that with their own means or created
producing documentaries under the age of 30 (more than 7%), which speaks to the mount- and rightfully bestowed ones.
ing means and possibilities for the younger generation to explore and experiment with
covering current realities. We now live in a more accessible age in terms of technological
availability, whereby more people can access filmmaking devices and techniques without
spending a fortune on them. Such diversity of generations also correlates with the diver-
sity of examination and focus, rendering the scope of the directors’ films not only more
diverse in in their topics and themes, but also in their perspectives and presentation. 

As regards gender diversity, more female filmmakers seemed to prefer to base them-
selves abroad rather than in their own country of origin. Such choice could possibly per-
tain to the deteriorated state of affairs concerning women’s status, rights, and safety in
Arab countries and societies. However, it is equally important to note the high percentage
of female directors that have released their documentaries in 2015 and 2016. To quote
one of the documentary and feature filmmakers, director Werner Herzog’s words could be
adopted to address, without monopolisation or appropriation, women’s wishes in both
the real and industrial world of filmmaking, whose rising numbers seem to say: “Give us
adequate images. We lack adequate images. Our civilisation does not have adequate im-
ages. And I think a civilisation is doomed or is going to die out like dinosaurs if it doesn’t
develop language for adequate images.” 

Subsequently, it is those images and the desire to perfect them that might be the reason
for the variation and diversity found in women’s film crews. As has been mentioned and
noted, crews with a female director were more likely to have a diverse crew than a male
director – that is, gender diversity is more likely to be found in a female filmmakers’ film
than in a male director’s film. This might be related to the mere existence of more men
working in cinema, or, alternately, when looking at the diverse crew members found in
female filmmakers, perhaps reverts back to their re-occupying spatial histories of violence
or social contexts of harassment. As such, female directors would desire to correct this
in their crew’s “purist” makeup, but also to equally develop environments of acceptance
and variation found in oppressed societies and communities who decide, perhaps sub-
consciously, to rebel against the norm and include as much variation as possible (in their
films and otherwise), be that within age, gender, or theme-related diversity.

Throughout this study, one may notice that it is this kind of language that Arab docu-
mentary filmmakers are creating, whether in their homeland, diaspora, or an elsewhere
definition of theirs, or through their youth or middle-aged experience. They have all
decided to surpass limitations of funding, geography, censorship, and society in order to
create a new language, collaborations, and platforms to counteract that which has been
monopolised and colonised, in order to critique, engage with, and perhaps change an

28 29
 Verification Committee
Tue Steen Müller The educated
librarian worked from 1975-1996
at the National Film Board of
Denmark (Statens Filmcentral)
as press secretary, distributor,
festival manager, film consultant
and spindoctor. He was part of
the team behind the Balticum
Film/TV Festival on Bornholm
Denmark 1990-2000 as well as
the set-up of Filmkontakt Nord,
Documentary and the EDN (Eu-
ropean Documentary Network)
of which he was the first director
1996-2005. He received the (Jør-
gen) Roos Award for his contri-
bution to Danish and European
documentary cinema in 2005.
Since 2006 he works as a free-
lance consultant and teacher in
documentary matters all over
the world and writes at www.
filmkommentaren.dk.
Guevara Namer is a Syrian photographer
and documentary filmmaker currently
based in Berlin, Germany. She is a grad-
uate in drama studies from the Higher
Institute of Dramatic Arts and holds a
photography certificate from the Insti-
tute of Applied Arts, both in Damascus,
Syria. Guevara is one-of the co-founders
and member of the general assembly of
DOX BOX e.V. in Berlin, where she worked
from 2014-2017 as manager of the organ-
30 isation’s educational content production
Irit Neidhardt is a producer, cu-
rator, speaker and author of var-
ious articles on subjects related
to cinema and the Arab World,
focusing on issues of co-oper-
ation and financing. She man-
ages the distribution and sales
company mec film. Neidhardt
is an associate producer of Mah-
moud al Massad’s award winning
feature-documentary Recycle
© Aysegül Kandemir
(2007) and co-producer of Si-
mon el-Habre’s highly acclaimed
The One Man Village (2008),
and Gate #5 (2011), Kamal Alja-
fari’s Port of Memory (2009),
Damien Ounouri’s award winning
F idai (2012) and Raed Rafei’s
Eccomi ... Eccoti (2017). She
worked as development consul-
tant for Tamer El-Said’s In the
Last Days of the City (2016)
among others, is a member of
the German Documentary Asso-
ciation (AG DOK), and has served
in juries for film festivals and
funding institutions in Germa-
ny, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine and
Lebanon.
and later as community moderator. Be-
fore joining DOX BOX e.V. in Berlin, she
ran the Documentary Campus of DOX BOX
international film festival Damascus, and
worked as production manager and line
producer for several internationally ac-
claimed documentary productions such
©DOX BOX / Malene Lauritsen
as RETURN TO HOMS (2013), SILVERED
WATER, SYRIA SELF-PORTRAIT (2014). In
2012 Guevara co-directed the documen-
tary MORNING FEARS, NIGHT CHANTS.
31
 The Films
2015
20 September (A Present from the Past),
Egypt 2015, by Kawthar Younis, 78 min.
23 Kilometres, Lebanon, Canada, United Arab
Emirates 2015, by Noura Kevorkian, 78 min.
A Tale of Water, Palm Trees and Family, United
Arab Emirates, by Nasser Aldhaheri, 162 min.
A Time to Rest (Trêve), Lebanon, France 2015,
by Myriam el Hajj, 67 min.
Aida, Egypt 2015, by Maysoon El-Massry,
20 min.
Aji-Bi, Under the Clock Tower (Aji-Bi, les
femmes de l’horloge), Morocco 2015, by Raja
Saddiki, 66 min.
Allô chérie, France, Lebanon 2015, by Danielle
Arbid, 23 min.
And on a Different Note, Egypt 2015, by
Mohammad Shawky Hassan, 24 min.
Babor Casanova, Switzerland 2015, by Karim
Sayad, 35 min.
Callshop Istanbul, Canada 2015, by Hind
Benchekroun, Sami Mermer, 89 min.
Checks & Balances (Contre-Pouvoirs), Algeria,
France 2015, by Malek Bensmaïl, 97 min.
Coma, Syria, Lebanon, by Sara Fattahi, 97 min.
False Start (Faux Départ), Morocco 2015, by
Yto Barrada, 23 min.
Free My Hands (Slip mine hænder), Denmark
2016, by Ala’a Mohsen, 30 min.
Hajwalah, USA, Saudi Arabia 2015, by Rana
Jarbou, 21 min.
Home, Syria, Lebanon 2015, by Rafat Alzakout,
70 min
Homeland (Iraq Year Zero), Iraq, France 2015,
by Abbas Fahdel, 334 min.
Into Darkness, Belgium 2015, by Rachida
El Garani, 31 min.
La dolce Siria, Egypt, United Arab Emirates
2014, by Ammar Al-Beik, 23 min.
32
La fiancée du Nil, Egypt, France 2015, by
Édouard Mills-Affif, 63 min.
Libya in Motion, Libya, Scotland 2016, 74 min.
Monumentum, Lebanon 2015, by Fadi Yeni
Turk, 80 min.
M’berra, Morocco, Mauritania 2014, by Hajar
Setta, 10 min.
Nasser (Les pharaons
de l’Egypte moderne), France, South Africa
2015, by Jihan el-Tahri, 97 min.
Omnia, United Arab Emirates 2015, by Amena
Al Nowais, 9 min.
One Minute, Belgium, Jordan 2015, by Dina
Naser, 11 min.
Out on the Street, Egypt 2015, by Jasmina
Metwaly, Philip Rizk, 73 min.
Possessed by Djinn, Jordan, Germany 2015,
by Dalia Al-Kury, 75 min.
Recollection, Palestine 2015, by Kamal
Aljafari, 70 min.
Roundabout in my Head
(Dans ma tête un rond-point), France, Algeria,
Qatar, Holland, Lebanon 2015, by Hassen
Ferhani, 100 min.
Salam, Belgium 2015, by Tareck Raffoul, 23 min.
Samir in the Dust (Samir dans la poussière),
Algeria, France, Qatar 2015, by Mohamed
Ouzine, 60 min.
Sing for me, Canada 2015, by Sama Waham,
38 min.
Skin, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, United Arab
Emirates 2015, by Afraa Batous, 85 min.
Speed Sisters, Palestine, USA, Qatar,
Denmark, UK, Canada 2015, by Amber Fares,
80 min.
Standing Men (Des hommes debout), France,
Lebanon 2015, by Maya Abdul-Malak, 55 min.
Stray, Egypt 2015, by Ahmed Festok, 64 min.
Terminus, Morocco, by Mohamed Akram
Nemassi, 71 min.
The Bread Road, Morocco, Belgium, France
2015, by Hicham Elladdaqi, 66 min.
The Digger, Lebanon 2015, by Ali Cherri,
25 min.
The Foreign Son (Le fils étranger), France,
Qatar 2015, by Abdallah Badis, 79 min.
The Purple Field, Palestine, France 2015,
by Nasri Hajjaj, 18 min.
The Tainted Veil, United Arab Emirates 2015,
by Mazen Al Khayrat, Ovidio Salazar, Nahla
Al Fahad, 78 min.
The Visit (Azziara), Egypt, Germany 2015,
by Nadia Mounier, Marouan Omara, 43 min.
2016
104 Wrinkels, Lebanon 2016, by Hady Zaccak,
83 min.
300 Miles, Syria, Lebanon, by Orwa Al
Mokdad, 95 min.
Abna Yaso, Sudan 2016, by Muzamil Nezamal-
deen, 74 min.
Aisha, Jordan, Lebanon 2016, by Asma Bseiso,
70 min.
A Magical Substance Flows Into Me, Pal-
estine, Germany, United Kingdom 2015, by
Jumana Manna, 68 min.
A Maid for Each, Lebanon, France, Norway,
United Arab Emirates 2016, by Maher Abi Samra,
67 min.
A Man Returned, UK, Netherlands, Denmark
2016, by Mahdi Fleifel, 30 min.
Ambulance, Norway, Palestine 2016, by Mo-
hamed Jabaly, 80 min.
A Memory in Khaki, Qatar 2016, by Alfoz Tan-
jour, 110 min.
As Birds Flying, Egypt, by Heba Amin, 7 min.
Asphalt, Lebanon, Qatar 2016, by Ali
Hammoud, 69 min.
This Is Exile: Diaries of Child Refugees,
England, Lebanon, Switzerland 2015, by Mani
Y. Benchelah, 56 min.
Tisseuses de rêves, Morocco, France 2015,
by Fatima Ithri Iroudhane, 52 min.
Tuk-Tuk, Egypt 2015, by Romany Saad, 75 min.
Tunisia Clash, Tunisia, Lebanon, France 2015,
by Hind Meddeb, 65 min.
Twenty Eight Nights and a Poem, Lebanon,
France 2015, by Akram Zaatari, 120 min.
Wachmn’hal, Morocco, by Salim Akki, 21 min.
We Have Never Been Kids, Egypt, United Arab
Emirates, Qatar, Lebanon 2015, by Mahmood
Soliman, 88 min.
Weight of the Shadow, Morocco, United Arab
Emirates 2015, by Hakim Belabbes, 82 min.
Atlal, Algeria, France 2016, by Djamel Kerkar,
111 min.
Ba Smina, Morocco, by Omar Tajamouti,
80 min.
Besieged Like Me, Syria, France 2016, by Hala
Al Abdallah, 96 min.
Chekhov in Beirut, France, Lebanon, by Carlos
Chahine, 51 min.
Chinese Ink, Lebanon, by Ghassan Salhab,
55 min.
Dag’aa, Palestine 2016, by Shadi Habib Allah,
19 min.
Egyptian Jeanne D’Arc, Egypt, Germany,
Kuwait, Qatar 2016, by Iman Kamel, 85 min.
Escapees to Ganges, Palestine, Norway,
53 min.
Farid, Jordan, Switzerland 2016, by Ashraf
Al-Shaka, 39 min.
Fayrouz – Day of Glory, Morocco, by Fouad
Zaari, 17 min.
Foyer, Tunisia, France 2016, by Ismaïl Bahri,
32 min.
Geographies, Lebanon, Armenia 2016, by
Chaghig Arzoumanian, 72 min.
33

Happily Ever After, Egypt 2016, by Nada
Riyadh, Ayman El Amir, 71 min.
Honey, Rain and Dust, United Arab Emirates
2016, by Nujoom Alghanem, 86 min.
Houses Without Doors, Syria, Lebanon 2016,
by Avo Kaprealian, 90 min.
If You Meant to Kill Me, Jordan 2014, by
Widad Shafakoj, 51 min.
Ismyrna, Lebanon, United Arab Emirates,
France 2016, by Joana Hadjithomas,
Khalil Joreige, 50 min.
Kumar, Qatar, by Eman Al Amri, 24 min.
Little Eagles, Egypt, Lebanon 2016, by Mo-
hamed Rashad, 77 min.
Mamsous, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Ara-
bia, by Shatha Masoud, 24 min.
My Paradise (Bihuşta Min), Germany, Kurdis-
tan-Syria 2016, by Ekrem Heydo, 104 min.
No Borders, Italy, by Haider Rashid, 16 min.
Now: End of Season, Lebanon 2015, by
Ayman Nahle, 20 min.
Nowhere to Hide, Norway, Sweden 2016, by
Zaradasht Ahmed, 85 min.
Off Frama aka Revolution until Victory,
Palestine, France, Qatar, Lebanon 2016, by
Mohanad Yaqubi, 63 min.
Offside, Lebanon 2015, by Marwan Hamdan,
20 min.
Omi Mouna’s Secret, Canada, Belgium, Tuni-
sia 2016, by Mohsen El Gharbi, 25 min.
Paradise! Paradise!, Austria 2016, by Kurd-
win Ayub, 78 min.
Radio Kobani, Netherlands 2016, by Reber
Dosky, 72 min.
Raja Bent El-Mellah, Morocco 2016, by Ab-
delilah Eljaouhary, 68 min.
Saida despite Ashes (Saïda malgré les cen-
dres), Tunisia 2016, by Soumaya
Bouallegui, 52 min.
Salah un Kabyle de Palestine, Switzerland,
Algeria, by Tahar Houchi, 20 min.
34
Stones Gods People, Lebanon, by Joe Namy,
5 min.
Tadmor, France, Switzerland, Lebanon,
Qatar, United Arab Emirates 2016, by Monika
Borgmann, Lokman Slim, 103 min.
Terra Firma, France, Qatar, United Arab
Emirates, by Laurent Ait Benalla, 71 min.
The Cow Farm, Syria, Egypt 2016, by Ali
SheikhKhudr, 60 min.
The Swallows of Love (Les hirondelles de
l’amour), Belgium, Morocco 2016, by Jawad
Rhalib, 80 min.
The War Show, Denmark, Finland, Syria 2016,
by Obaidah Zytoon, Andreas Dalsgaard,
100 min.
The Weavers of the Chaambi, Tunisia, by
Nawfel Saheb-Ettaba, 30 min.
This Little Father Obsession, Lebanon 2016,
by Selim Mourad, 105 min.
Those from the Shore (Ceux du rivage /
Ձյուն կար), Lebanon, Qatar, Armenia,
France, by Tamara Stepanyan, 84 min.
Those Who Remain, Lebanon, United Arab
Emirates 2016, by Eliane Raheb, 95 min.
Twice upon a Time, Lebanon, Qatar, USA
2016, by Niam Itani, 74 min.
Une fuite sans fin, Morocco, by Khalid
Moudnib, 35 min.
Une maison sans televisions, Morocco, by
Mohammed Msahal, 13 min.
We Are Egyptian Armenians, Egypt 2016, by
Waheed Sobhi, 86 min.
Whose Country?, Egypt, France, USA, by
Mohamed Siam, 57 min.
Zaineb Hates the Snow, Tunisia, France,
Qatar, Lebanon, United Arab Emirates 2016,
by Kaouther Ben Hania, 94 min.
The Documentary and the Arab:
On Fictionalization and Emancipation
Irit Neidhardt
Documentary films that are made for international film festivals or theatrical releases
usually deal with social or political issues. Their purpose can be to mirror society, to cre-
ate dialogue in society, to explore a subject, to create awareness, to rethink traditions,
to educate or to inform, to collect testimonies, to write history, or to become a famous
director. The films can be emancipatory, opposing or supporting a ruling system, focus
on the individual or the collective, or be self-centered. The set-up of the production, its
funding, its partners and budget, reflect the film’s intention and identify its target au-
dience. As documentaries are perceived by the majority of their spectators as depicting
(the) reality, telling the truth, or lies, their makers bear political and social responsibility.
With regard to contemporary Arab, as well as African, East Asian or Latin American,
documentary filmmaking this responsibility, or burden, carries an additional layer: while
Arab films deal with Arab politics and society, and are being shot in Arab language (other
subjects usually do not get funding), most funders and festival programmers are Western.
They, as their festivals’ audiences, almost never share the social, political or historical
knowledge and experience of the film-makers or their protagonists. Seeing an Arab film,
documentary or fiction, for most of these decision-makers or viewers is a rare, if not sin-
gular, occasion. Many people, also film-professionals, view Arab fiction films as real as
the documentary films they see (see e.g. Neidhardt 2011). What does this mean for Arab
documentary filmmakers?
This article is divided into two parts: the first part deals with the perception of the Arab
and/or Muslim in Western media and societies, focusing on examples from Germany. The
second part discusses the conditions of Arab documentary production from a historical
perspective, it examines film institutions and looks at the work of individual Arab directors.
Western media and Islam
In 2007, Kai Hafez and Carola Richter published a seminal study on the image of violence
and conflict in Islam in news magazines, reportages and talk-shows on the German public
TV stations ARD and ZDF (Hafez and Richter 2007). The two stations are the opinion making
channels in Germany. The researchers state, as studies from other Western countries do
as well (Vincente/Otero/López/Pardo 2010, Alsultany 2012, Gillet 2016), that the shift in
the representation of Arabs and Muslims as predominantly being connected with violence
and terror came with the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 and the Iran hostage crisis 1
and have been reinforced since 9/11. The study was conducted over a period of several
months in 2006, and asked in which contexts Islam was talked about in the above men-
tioned TV formats. The authors found that in 80% of the programs, Islam was connected
to an image of threat and danger for politics, society and state: “Not the representation
of the negative is the problem, but the ignoring of the normal, the everyday and the
35
 positive” (ibid.:7). Hafez and Richter stress that they did not analyze how the respective
programs talk about Islam, but the selection of the subjects talked about. According to
the agenda-setting theory, the subjects selected for broadcasts and reports are highly
influential on what people think about.
A shortcoming of this study, which was widely received in German political and social
institutions and had a large influence on policy making, was not to define the notion of Is-
lam. From the titles of the broadcasts listed by Hafez and Richter, it becomes obvious that
they talk about Arab countries, Afghanistan and Iran (many Europeans think that Afghani-
stan and Iran are Arab countries), as well as about Arab and Turkish immigrants in Europe.
A discussion of this elision can be found in the introduction to Evelyn Alsulstany’s
in-depth study of US-American TV series after 9/11. Her findings are equally true for
Western Europe.
“The Iran hostage crisis was an important moment in conflating Arab, Muslim, and
Middle Eastern identities. Though Iran is not an Arab country, during the hostage
crisis Iran came to stand for Arabs, the Middle East, Islam and terrorism, all of which
terms came to be used interchangeably. It is commonly assumed that Iranians and
Pakistanis are Arabs and that all Arabs are Muslim and all Muslims are Arabs, despite
the fact that there are 1.2 billion Muslims world-wide and that approximately 15 to
20 percent of them are Arab. […] Why are these categories interchangeable when
most Muslims are not Arab and when none of the most populous countries are
Arab? This conflation enables a particular racial Othering that would not operate in
the same way through other conflation, such as, for example, Arab/Christian, Arab/
Jew, or Indonesian/Muslim. The result is particularly damaging, since it reduces the
inherent – and enormous – variety of the world’s Muslim population, projecting all
Muslims as one particular type: fanatical, misogynistic, anti-American. […] With this
conflation established, it is easy to conceptualize the United States as the invers
of everything that is ‘Arab/Muslim’: The United States is thus a land of equality and
democracy, culturally diverse and civilized, a land of progressive men and liberated
women” (Alsultany 2012:9).
With regard to Germany, Thorsten Gerald Schneiders names two developments which
caused the linguistic transformation from “guest workers” to “foreigners” to “Muslims”:
firstly, a strong public resistance to xenophobic discourses after several murderous at-
tacks on accommodation centers for refugees and private houses of immigrant families
in the 1990s, and secondly an increasing number of media reports on atrocities in the
name of Islam. In parallel, the notion of the white race was replaced by the concept of
the European or Occidental culture (Schneiders 2014). Thomas Deltombe describes similar
developments for France. In the last two to three decades he observes a reformulation of
older racist resentment. “Where one said ‘Arabs’ one says ‘Muslims’. Where one said one
wanted to ‘defend the Christian values’ one now prefers the supposed ‘French values’. A
whole series of great ‘values’, which are too easily defined as ‘French’ are mobilized – in
36
the quasi-military sense of the term – to build and maintain a symbolic barrier separating
between ‘them’ and ‘us’: secularism, the role of the woman, freedom of expression, etc.”
(Deltombe 2016). These reformulations coincide with the discourse about immigration
in France and the claim of the immigrants’ cultural difference in the 1980s, when people
were careful not to be openly racist.
If the Iranian Revolution and the 9/11 attacks are historical events that are said to have
strengthened the negative image of Arabs and Islam in the West, what role do the popular
uprisings of 2010/11 play in the perception of the Arab/Muslim Other? Few studies looked
at the media reporting on the Arab Spring in German leading newspapers and print mag-
azines (Brinkmann 2012, id. 2013, Stegemann 2013). Their finding was that during the first
three month of the uprisings, the press was euphoric about the revolutions and raised
attention to the developments in the Arab world. Especially after the regimes in Tunisia
and Egypt fell, European journalists interviewed people in the street or representatives
of the civil society, which was usually not the case before. Additional space was given to
background reportage. This more complex reporting lasted for the short term only and
then information became more negative than before the revolutions, Brinkmann (as well
as Stegemann) found.
Strikingly in German studies about the image of Islam in the media, the use of the
very unspecific and insufficient term ‘Islam’ as an analytical tool is never questioned.
Also with regard to the rise of Islamist parties to power in Tunisia and Egypt (Brinkmann
2012, id. 2013, Stegmann 2013), and ISIS’s declaration of their state (Köster 2015), none
of the authors fans out ‘Islam’ for their study. Neither in the media nor in research were
the questions debated about Islam and the Arab World reviewed after the end of 2011,
although the politics in several Arab countries, especially with regard to Islam, did so in
a substantive manner. Additionally, the media’s euphoria about the revolution was not
problematized.
Thorsten Gerald Schneiders (2014) reminds his readers that the task of news journalism
is to report on the unusual, the new, the problematic and the controversial rather than on
daily life issues. Therefore the negative reporting is partly due to media structures. ZDF
veteran war reporter Halim Hosny, who now works at the station’s current affairs depart-
ment, emphasized at the international workshop Images of the “Middle East” – Reception
and Responsibility at the University of Marburg in June 2016, that the rather negative
image of the Arab World has to do with the character of news in general. Like Schneiders,
he emphasized that it is the longer formats such as reportage or documentaries where
another image is created and where the news can be contextualized.
With reference to Deltombe, Camille Gillet (2016) brings to mind that with the estab-
lishment of private TV channels in the 1980s, and one should add with the introduction
of the rating system in the 1990s, media became about selling, about shock and spectacle
rather than analysis. What do such programs look like? And who is directing the films?
For the television section of the online edition of German wide newspaper Frankfurter
Rundschau, I randomly, and upon request from the editorial board, review films that re-
late to the Arab World or Islam, be it (TV) documentaries or feature length fiction films.
37
 Seven of my eight reviews in the year 2016 were about films broadcast on Arte, a cultural
channel with a very low viewing rate, and they were public TV (co-)productions. With the
exception of two directors with Arab roots, all filmmakers were either from the USA or
from Western Europe. In accordance to the above mentioned, the subjects of the films (of
which only one was fiction), were ISIS, working women in Saudi-Arabia, sectarianism in
Iraq, Salafis in France, illiteracy of Moroccan women in Belgium and archeology in Jorda-
nian Petra. None of the documentaries’ authors seem to have used Arab sources, which
were accessible in English, for their research. The translation is also meagre. In the case
of the documentary on sectarianism in Iraq, some interviewees state that they are against
sectarianism and fight for the improvement of their country, while standing in front of
graffitis or posters that claim the opposite. The authors/directors of the film on female
professionals in Saudi-Arabia spoke to a number of women who are earning their money
in sectors in which women indeed were absent so far. Yet they did not talk about or to
the Saudi female sociologist who lives and works in Ryiadh, and published an important
study on female work in her country before the restructuring of the economy began a few
years ago. All the films spoke about the themes which are set by the media agenda, the
makers travelled on location, be it in France or Belgium or in the respective Arab country,
yet they did not put their subject into historical, social or economic contexts.
The uninformed Western gaze on Arabs and Islam, as well as the ignorance of Arab
expertise, precede the Islamic Revolution which marks the starting point for most up-
to-date media analysis. Endless texts are published on the racist depiction of Arabs in
cinema. As an example, Jack G. Shaheen’s Reel Bad Arabs. How Hollywood Vilifies a People
(2001) shall suffice here as it seems to be the most comprehensive overview with regard
to the 20th century. In his encyclopedic book, the author reviews nearly one thousand
Hollywood films from the silent movie era until the turn of the millennium and documents
how Arabs are represented.
With regard to stereotyping in documentary films, Éric Deroo’s T he C inema as
Zoo-keeper (2002), and his documentary Human Zoos (2002), as well as Philip Schef-
fner’s The Half-moon Files (2007), are of relevance as they study the origin of the
kind of images we have become accustomed to. The two filmmakers are looking at the
relation between ethnographic exhibitions, science and the new technologies of record-
ing image and sound. Ethnographic exhibitions were invented in the second part of the
19th century as part of the zoo by German fish dealer, animal collector and zoo director
Gottfried Claes Carl Hagenbeck in Hamburg. As his animal exhibitions were well received,
he decided to also show his visitors the people who lived with the animals in the faraway
countries. The concept was very successful and soon these exhibitions travelled all over
central Europe and the US. By the turn of the century up to 30 million tickets were sold for
successful exhibitions in London or Paris. The shows took place at amusement parks, in
zoos, in botanical gardens or in special areas where mock authentic sceneries were built,
mainly villages, markets and streets with craft-shops in which the imported people staged
those parts of their life that excited the visitors most. As soon as cinema was invented, the
Lumière Brothers started shooting strangers. In a multi-language distribution catalogue
38
of Lumière films from 1907, a series named Ashanti-Negros was offered. The titles of
the individual films (by that time films were usually shorter than one minute) read Dance
of the Men, Toilet of a negro-child I and II etc. The following explanation was
attributed to the titles: “These shots were made in an Ashanti-village that was built in Lyon
during the exhibition. All these shots are very interesting. Their titles contain sufficient
information about their content” (as cited by Deroo 2012: 151).
During World War I, the German government separated the Muslim prisoners of war, soldiers
from the French and British colonies, from the non-Muslim prisoners and detained them in
special Muslim camps: the Half-moon Camp and the Vineyard Camp, both situated near Berlin.
The Half-moon Camp was equipped in the way the Germany military imagined a typical Muslim
village. That the detainees came from places as distant from each other as Morocco and India,
did not play a role. Berlin’s first mosque was built in the camp, an Imam was hired, the small
Muslim population of the Berlin came here for prayers, at holidays sheep were slaughtered
halal. The idea was to please the Muslims so they would defect and start a Jihad against the
British and the French. The inmates of the Half-moon Camp were used for scientific research
by university scholars, among others, to learn about the different ethnicities. In October 1915,
the secret Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission was founded in order to record the voices
of the world. Scientists came to the camp to photograph and measure the prisoners, and to
record their voices. Philip Scheffner made his feature documentary The Half-moon Files
(2007) on this endeavor. He also shows footage and PR material of colonial films that were shot
in the camp. For the many Berlin-based film production companies, the Half-moon Camp and
its population served as set for colonial films. To turn the camp in the Brandenburg province
with its very sandy grounds into different exotic places, plants typical for the respective region
were brought from the botanical garden.
The great value of The Half-moon Files, as well as Éric Deroo’s documentary Hu-
man Zoos (2002) about the ethnographic exhibitions, is that they show clips of the films
that were shot in the European locations as well as images of the camp or respectively
the exhibition space. This allows us to get an idea about the image composition and to
see how close the Eiffel Tower or the roof of a greenhouse were if the camera angle would
have been slightly changed.
“The colonial empire was expanded and the cinematograph was developed further.
Now the cameramen left the zoos and went on location. These films, that have to
be classified between an exploration and an exploitation, resembled, regardless if
you call them documentary films, narrative documentary films, later also named
as stories or grand reportages, with very few examples in composition and basic
assumptions the exhibitions at amusement parks and in zoos” (Deroo 2002:151 ff.).
“Hence the production of the ‘wild people’ always followed the same mechanisms, from
the first stagings of Barnum or Hagenbeck to extremely successful Hollywood produc-
tions. One can think of the Vietnam in Apocalypse now, of Rambo, of the East in the
Indiana Jones films, of the Gulf war, of Afghanistan and the future war zones (ibd. 157).
39
 Irit Neidhardt is a producer, cu-
Arab institutions and documentary filmmaking rator, speaker and author of var-
Filmmaking was a tool in the anti-colonial struggle of those countries that became re- ious articles on subjects related
publics. This is true for the highly commercial work of private banker Talaat Harb in Egypt to cinema and the Arab World,
starting in the 1920s, as it is for the films of the Algerian FLN in the 1950s and 1960s or the focusing on issues of co-oper-
Palestinian PLO in the 1970s and 80s; while the former stood for independence, the latter
ation and financing. She man-
represented revolution. Though armed resistance existed in most colonies for decades,
ages the distribution and sales
decolonization was possible only after Europe weakened militarily and economically af-
company mec film. Neidhardt
ter two successive great wars, alongside the increasing influence of socialist states. With
independence, the new nation states took over some of the former colonial institutions
is an associate producer of Mah-
which remained in their country and founded new ones. moud al Massad’s award winning
In 1945, the United Nations were founded and the constitution of the United Nations feature-documentary Recycle
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, was signed. The three Arab (2007) and co-producer of Si-
countries among the founding members were Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The mon el-Habre’s highly acclaimed

© Aysegül Kandemir
majority of Arab lands were still under colonial rule then. The purpose of the UNESCO is The One Man Village (2008),
and Gate #5 (2011), Kamal Alja-
“Article I 1. […] to contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among fari’s Port of Memory (2009),
the nations through education, science and culture in order to further universal Damien Ounouri’s award winning
respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental F idai (2012) and Raed Rafei’s
freedoms which are affirmed for the peoples of the world, without distinction of
Eccomi ... Eccoti (2017). She
race, sex, language or religion, by the Charter of the United Nations. 2. To realize this
worked as development con-
purpose the Organization will: (a) Collaborate in the work of advancing the mutual
sultant for Tamer El-Said’s I n
knowledge and understanding of peoples, through all means of mass communication
and to that end recommend such international agreements as may be necessary to The UNESCO, and other UN institutions, also pro-
the Last Days of the City
promote the free flow of ideas by word and image;[…].” (UNESCO Constitution) duced films on anti-colonial struggles which were (2016) among others, is a mem-
shown at international film festivals until the end ber of the German Documentary
In 1966, the Arab Centre for Cinema & Television in Beirut prepared an anthology for of the 1980s under the name of the respective UN Association (AG DOK), and has
the UNESCO which was published under the title The Cinema in the Arab Countries (Sa- department as other films are presented under the served in juries for film festivals
doul 1966), and gave the first overview of the state of cinema in the Arab World from a names of their countries of production.2 and funding institutions in Ger-
predominantly Arab perspective. It is based on four round table meetings in Beirut un- The texts History of the Cinema in N. Africa (Cheriaa many, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine
der the auspices of the UNESCO which took place between 1962 and 1965, as well as on 1966a), Film Distribution in Tunisia (Cheriaa 1966b), and Lebanon.
conferences in Alexandria and Amman under the patronage of the Arab League and with and The Encouragement of the N. African Cinema
the participation of the UNESCO. The latter gatherings were organized by request of the (Cheriaa 1966c) in Sadoul’s anthology give an idea
Beirut Round Table Conferences. The assembled texts are descriptions and analysis of the about the state of the cinema using the example of the Maghreb after the independence
respective countries’ problems, statistics, a list of films produced in the Arab countries, in the mid-1950s until the early 1960s.3
the presentation of pan-Arab and inter-Arab television and cinema institutions, and rec-
ommendations to the Arab governments and the UNESCO. Representatives of the UNESCO “[…] The third period, the present one, is marked by different circumstances. The
as well as European film experts were present at those meetings and contributed texts for Maghreb is independent. So the film production I have mentioned feels foreign, and
the publication. The UNESCO as an intergovernmental body with a formally equal status tries either to stay as it is or to make concessions, according to the temperament or
of all its members could set up or strengthen the institutions needed in order to meet the interest of the producer. As a result two trends may now be discerned.
the ideals of the UNESCO constitution. Other than direct support by individual nation
states which is granted under the laws, and hence the conditions, of the donor state, the The first is purely commercial and on the out-look for anything that can be turned to
supranational institution does by definition not impose the interest of one nation state profit – such as picturesque exteriors and local color, which still have their appeal, cheap
on the other.

40 41
 extras or other facilities readily granted by inexperienced indigenous authorities, too
economically and legally dependent to be difficult to get on with. This first trend naturally
favours the commercial glamour of the straight, oriental romances of an earlier period,
which find a market in all climes. The result is Tunisie, Top Secret or Le Voleur de Baghdad,
both equally cosmopolitan (film units are no longer all French, but also Italian, German
or American) and equally anxious to ignore or avoid any reference to the authentic truth
of the Maghreb, which only serves as a frame, a setting… […]
The second trend evidenced by the national film production is in my opinion much more
worthwhile because it shows a real interest in the Maghreb and is more committed, as
it were. It is the trend followed for the most part by young producers whose experience
of the earlier periods of film production in the Maghreb had been gained through the
I.D.H.E.C. lectures, film libraries or film clubs, which had taught them to despise such films.
In a broader context, too, the Maghreb is for them a human and historical reality, not just
a good set for shooting films” (Cheriaa 1966a:111 ff.).
In its essence, Cheriaa’s description is valid until date. The Moroccan Center for Cine-
matography (CCM), which was “established by the Royal Decree of 9 January 1944, which
makes it one of the world’s oldest public establishments tasked with regulating and
promoting film” (Ouarzazate Film Commission) created, together with the Regional Coun-
cil, the Ouarzazate Film Commission in 2008. On the commission’s website it says: “The
region of Ouarzazate, the gateway to the desert, is a true open-air film set where super
productions have been filmed since many decades. Ouarzazate, the city that offers mil-
lennium peacefulness with its magnificent Kasbahs, its houses with original architecture,
its infrastructure and its various movie sites” (Ouarzazate Film Commission). Among the
recently shot movies with the support of the CCM are Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven
(2005), and Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), season 3 of HBO’s Game of Thrones
(2013) or Sönke Wortmann’s Pope Joan (2009). The Royal Jordanian Film Commission lists,
among quite a number of Arab as well as some European and Indian movies, works like
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Steven Spielberg, 1989), Mission to Mars
(Brian de Palma, 2000), Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2007) or X-Men Apocalypse
(Brian Singer, 2015) (film.jo). It is not by coincidence that the public companies that en-
courage production for pure profit are royal companies. The kingdoms did not use film
as a tool in decolonization, and liberation or emancipation are by definition not part of
a monarchist system.
With regard to the second and very new trend Cheriaa wrote about, Jacques Baratier’s
Goha (1958), with Egyptian actor Omar Sharif and Tunisian folk-dance star Zina in the lead
roles, needs to be mentioned. The film is based on the novel Le Livre de Goha Le Simple
by Albert Josipovici et Albert Adès which was adapted by Lebanese poet Georges Shéhadé
for the screen, and is the first feature film to be shot in independent Tunisia as an official
Tunisian-French coproduction. Goha was shown and awarded in Cannes in 1958, and its
restored and digitized version was part of the Cannes Classics series at the 2013 festival
edition. Earlier more aware films productions are Albert Lamorisse’s Bim, Le Petit Ane
(1949) and Noces de Sable (1949) by André Zwobada. In order to make these films that
42
tried to depict the Maghreb in a more visible truthful way, Cheriaa claimed4 a debate about
the regulation of film distribution and accessibility of screens. In addition to Cheriaa’s
texts, those demands can be found in the suggestions published in the anthology.
As yet the distributors of the purely commercial films hold an unchallenged position,
and in many cases also owned the screens. From the 384 new programs (one feature
length film and a supplementary short film) that were distributed in the 105 cinemas in
Tunis per year in the early 1960s,5 160 films came from US-American distributors, 98 from
French distributors, 32 from Egyptian companies, 26 from Italy, 1 from a socialist country
and 67 from other sources. 8.3% of the films were originally in Arabic, 23.6% originally in
French and 59.5% French dubbed, 9.2% Arabic dubbed and 8.3% accompanied by French
subtitles (see Cheriaa 1966b:160 ff.).
While the analysis in Sadoul’s book focuses on fiction films, documentary filmmak-
ing plays a role in the referrals. Point 5 of the Recommendations of the Beirut Round
Table 1964, for example, is not explicit in the suggested films’ formats but in the histori-
cal and cultural content which will be recurrent in many documentaries of the following
decades. Also the multi-language versions became custom.
“Recommends the production of the following films to revivify the Arab Cultural
heritage and introduce it to the world:
1- Arab pioneers in medical science
2- Arab pioneers in mathematics
3- Arab pioneers in astronomy
4- Arab pioneers in music
Lebanon will be allotted the production of the first film, the United Arab Republic
the production of the second film, the Syrian Arab Republic the production of the
third, and the Tunisian Republic that of the fourth.
Each of these films will be produced in colour, on 35mm film, 15 to 20 minutes long.
It also should be dubbed in at least three live languages other than the Arabic lan-
guage. 16 mm copies should be made if necessary.
The Conference suggests that the U.N.E.S.C.O. should participate in the production
of these films” (Sadoul 1966:254).
The Seminar on the Arab Cinema in Alexandria in August 1964 “recommends to the
competent authorities of each Arab country the following: […] 4-To produce documentary
films and to this end, set up the necessary studios” (ibid.:259). The Arab League recom-
mended in 1965 and 1966 concerning cinema and television:
“[…] During this meeting, it was decided to start a campaign of propaganda, in favour
of the Palestinian question on an international level, and to this end, an important
budget was set aside. This project plans, among other manifestations, to make a
full length film and a whole series of shorter films for television, on this subject”
(ibid.:261).
43
 While the films on the Palestinian issue which were indeed produced by Arab coun-
tries, mainly by Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, and to a lesser extent by Egypt, it is difficult
to say on the basis of the documents at hand if they were made because of this very
recommendation. In any case, several such documentaries6 can be found, for example,
in the catalogue of the Leipzig International Film-week for Documentary and Short Film
throughout the 1970s. By that time only films produced by public Arab organizations
were shown at the festival, which was nationalized in 1973. The film-week in Leipzig in
the German Democratic Republic (1949-1990) was founded in 1955. It is the oldest doc-
umentary film festival in the world and until the end of the Cold War, it was the biggest
and most important one; some international film professionals called it the “Cannes
of Documentary”.
The festival in Leipzig was an important meeting point for Arab documentarists, here
ideas were exchanged, films viewed and networks created, among them the Union of Arab
Documentarists, officially founded in 1975 in Baghdad. The aims of the organization, in
which 16 Arab countries and the PLO were represented, were to consolidate the Arab doc-
umentary film world and to support those cinematographies of member states that were
not yet well developed, for example by organizing studies abroad, especially in socialist
countries. The Union of Arab Documentarists also co-funded films such as Nabiha Lofti’s
Tell al-Zaatar (1975) or Mohamad Malas’ classic al-Manam (The Dream), which was
shot in 1981 and completed in 1987. An Arab Documentary Film Festival was considered,
and as a first step, a Palestinian Film Festival was held in Baghdad in March 1976. Despite
addressing Arab spectators, it was of importance for the union to reach an international
audience with progressive Arab documentaries (see Junge 1975:112 f.).
Syrian documentarist Omar Amiralay, who was, together with Mohamad Malas, found-
er of the ciné-club in Damascus, made his first film, Film-Essay on the Euphrates Dam
(Film-Muhawalah ‘An Sadd al-Furat) in 1970 and completed his last work Flood in Baath
County (Tufan fi Balad al Baath) in 2003. In an interview given in 2005, he resumes his
experiences with the objective of influencing or correcting the Western image of the Arab
countries through films:
“The decision to return to Syria was motivated by two reasons: a love story with a
Damascene, and a profound political and professional disenchantment that acutely
questioned the purpose of pursuing life and work in France. Let’s leave the first rea-
son aside. The second reason raises many questions for me, not without a great deal
of sorrow, on the significance and raison d’être of being an Arab filmmaker living in
exile in a European country, working specifically for French television stations. My
disillusionment occurred during the invasion of Kuwait and the second Gulf War, as I
watched the French media’s short-sighted coverage in general, but also the television
stations’ paucity of vision in their compulsively shallow pursuit of each day’s events.
I had been under the illusion for years that my work added to the body of work by
other Arab filmmakers that would have accumulated to provide an alternative body
of representations and meanings of our countries. I had hoped that in the medium
44
or the long term, they would serve to anchor foundations for a more accurate and
intimate understanding of what really goes on inside our countries” (Hala Alabdalla
Yakoub 2006: 116).
Amiralay, one of the most prominent Arab documentarists, completed his first works
with the Syrian National Film Organization and Syrian National TV, yet the films could not
be publicly shown in their country of production despite receiving high attention abroad.
The director left for France and made the majority of his films, which were usually medi-
um-length, for Arte. Composed around a personage of media interest like Michel Seurat,
the French sociologist and researcher who was kidnapped in Lebanon in 1985 and mur-
dered a year later in On a Day of Ordinary Violence, My Friend Michel Seurat
(1996), or Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese president in The Man with the Golden
Soles (2000), or around a subject like the failed politics of industrial modernization in
Dajaj (Chicken 1977), or the effects of decades of one-party and military rule in Flood
in Baath Country (Tufan fi Balad al-Baath 2003), Amiralay contextualizes and
comments on Syrian politics. While these themes are usually dealt with in a standard
reportage format, his carefully composed images that resemble paintings rather than film
and put the interviewees in an unconventional position, are definitely surprises on the
TV screen. The mise-en-scene, in opposition to informative films in which interviews are
usually conducted in a more or less neutral environment, adds information that allows
a deeper understanding of the subject. For example, the chicken farmer who did this job
for the prospect of better profit margins when growing the animals in a rather industrial
way. With those monies, he could buy the car he fancied and leans on this engine hood
during the interview in Chicken. This kind of commentary at times creates intimacy, and
at times rejection, with the protagonists. With regard to Western audiences, the confu-
sion of the viewing habits at least resulted in respect for Amiralay as an outstanding
artist. The question about the political and social effect the director answered himself
by leaving Europe.
Belgium based Palestinian film-maker Michel Khleifi, who is known for his work in
documentary and fiction alike, also co-produced his documentary films with European TV
stations. He is the first filmmaker from within the Palestinian lands occupied in 1948 and
1967 to make movies. Since the end of the 1960s the PLO, as united Palestinian front and
liberation organization in exile, had released mainly short documentaries which were used
as counter media to the Western news reporting. The PLO films had two taboos: to never
criticize Palestinians or Palestinian politics and to not spell out the return the organization
was fighting for. Khleifi did not need to return, for him Palestine is neither past nor a vague
future, but present. It is not dreamlike but real and as hostile as beautiful. Yet it is lost.
In his three very different documentaries, Fertile Memory (al-Zakira al-Khasba,
1980, 99’), Ma’aloul Celebrates its Destruction (Ma’aloul Tahtafilu bi Dam-
ariha, 1984, 30’) and Route 181 – Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel
(Tariq 181 – Jus min Rihla ila Filistin Israel, co-directed with Eyal Sivan, 2003,
270’) he is exploring this loss from different angles. Fertile Memory is the intimate and
45
 deeply political portrait of two Palestinian single women on the two sides of the green
line: Farah Hatoum from Nazareth, a widowed farmer without land (who is the aunt of
the director), and the much younger Sahar Khalifeh from Ramallah, a divorced single
mother, novelist and teacher at Birzeit University. The daily struggles and resistance of
the two women reflect the similar conditions of living under occupation and being single
women in a patriarchal society, as well as their differences due their class and genera-
tion. In Ma’aloul Celebrates its Destruction, the director explores the relation
of the former villagers of Ma’aloul in the Galilee, which was destroyed in the Nakba, to
their land. They live only a few kilometers away from Ma’aloul which is still in ruins and
is declared a prohibited area by the Israeli authorities. Only on the Israeli Independence
Day, the Nakba Day, the villagers are allowed to visit. The film is shot on this holiday. In
school the teacher has to teach the children about independence, in the afternoon some
villagers go to the ruins for a picnic. One family stays at home and watches their large
painting of the village on the wall. Route 181 – Fragments of a Journey to Pal-
estine-Israel is the journey, by car, along the partition line of the UN Resolution 181
from 1947. The random meetings with people living along this imaginary border, which
marks geographic and social margins for most parts of the way, allow a diverse and hence
precise view on the fabric of society.
Khelifi opens all these films with a historical introduction and makes sure that the place
he is filming at is specified. As he said at a master class at the Cinema Days in Ramallah/
Palestine in 2016, it is crucial for him to have a contextualization of his story. When the
film is new, the viewers shall know what led to the reality he is depicting and when the
film became an historic document, the then contemporary viewers shall be aware of the
historical knowledge the people had by the time the film was made. “The world is con-
stantly changing and if I am looking at it now I have the feeling that my hitherto existing
documentaries little by little become historical documents. As Palestinian I am obsessed
by the question how I can make my own picture, a picture that originates in me and
through me” (Khleifi 2006: 279).
Lebanese director Mohamad Soueid is often said to be the one who introduced the
first person singular to Arab documentary filmmaking. His essayist video documentaries
influenced the Beirut video art scene of the 1990s and 2000s in finding a language to
face and to deal with the violence of the civil war. His autobiographical trilogy Tango of
Yearning (1998), Nightfall (2000), and Civil War (2002), gained Soueid international
recognition. While most Lebanese post-war films deal with the taboo of the war and the
rupture this silence marks, Soueid is subtly waving continuity into his films. In the 1970s
he had been working as an assistant director for commercial Lebanese movie produc-
tions, one of which was Samir Gwesseini’s Cats of Hamra Street (Kitat shareh al
Hamra, 1973), a film inspired by Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider. Two of Soueid’s video
essays deal with his membership in the PLO’s Fatah movement, Nightfall (Indama
Ya’ati al-Masa) and My Heart Beats Only for Her (Ma Hataftu li Ghayriha,
2008). In both documentary essays, film figures from the Cats of Hamra Street appear
as themselves: the dwarf who is a friend of the rockers and of whom they make fun
46
by throwing him around like a ball, and the boss of the bikers. The first is one of the
director’s comrades of the Fatah’s Lebanese student’s brigade who survived the war and
made Nightfall with Soueid, the second a passionate biker who shares his memories
and gives his view on present day Lebanon from an explicitly non-political perspective
in My Heart Beats Only for Her. This aspect of Soueid’s work is usually not spoken
about, which might be due to the fact that critics and academics who take interest in
video art are mostly foreigners who are not familiar with the history of Lebanese com-
mercial cinema.
Whether or not one knows the Cats of Hamra Street is not relevant for understand-
ing Soueid’s videos. If one knows the film, one can add an aspect to one’s contemplation.
At the same time, had the director not reflected the interrelation between his work in
commercial cinema and his political engagement, the documentary essays as such would
lack comprehension. Or as Michel Khleifi put it at the masterclass in Ramallah: If you
wanted to make a documentary about this column here in the room now, you needed
to touch it, to look at it from all sides, to taste it, to tap it, to get to know it by heart and
then you could write your treatment.
Notes
1. The Iran hostage crisis was a diplomatic standoff between Iran and the United States. Fifty-two American diplomats
and citizens were held hostage for 444 days from November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981 after a group of Iranian students
belonging to the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line, who supported the Iranian Revolution, took over the U.S.
Embassy in Tehran.
2. A catalogue of UNESCO produced films can be found here atom.archives.unesco.org/archives-of-film-production
3. With regard to debates in the 1960s it is important to remember the context of that period: the populations in the
Arab countries were much smaller in the 1950s and 60s than they are today. Some examples: Algeria about 10 m in 1960
and over 40 m in 2015, Tunisia 3 m in 1950 and 12 m in 2015, Egypt 12 m in 1950 and 100 m in 2015, Syria 3 m in 1950 and
22 m in 2015. All figures according to the population division of the United Nations esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Graphs/Demo-
graphicProfiles/ Until the 1970s when a large migration to the cities took place the vast majority of the population lived
in the countryside. All over the globe much more people lived from work in agriculture. In general electricity was distrib-
uted less consistent than it is today. In the decade after independence most states did not decide about their economic
system, capitalist or socialist, yet. Though the European states were weakened due to the wars, the former colonizers
and their allies did not give up on the capitalist/imperialist ideology which by definition fights the industrialization and
development of independent economies of the former colonies, as well as other countries.
4. In 1950 Taha Cheriaa founded the Tunisian Federation of Ciné-Clubs (TFCC) and in 1966 the Journées cinématographiques
de Carthage (JCC) which both operate till today.
5. For comparison: the total number of screens in Tunisia was in 2008: 18, 2010: 10, 2013: 17 see uis.unesco.org/en/country/
tn?theme=culture, television was introduced in Tunisia in 1966
6. The National Syrian Film Organization under the directorship of A. Hamid Merei produced the feature fiction films The
Dupes by Tawfik Saleh (1972) and Borhan Alaouie’s Kafr Kassem (1975).
47
 The Aesthetics of Animation
Bibliography (all links last retrieved 2/2017)
1. Alabdalla Yakoub, Hala (2006): Interview with Omar Amiraly, in: Rasha Salti (ed.): Insights into Syrian Cinema. Essays
and Conversations with Contemporary Filmmakers, Rattapallax Press and arte east, pp. 113-117.
in Arab Documentary Filmmaking
2. Alsultany, Evelyn (2012): Arab and Muslims in the Media. Race and Representation after 9/11. New York University Press.
3. Blanchard, Pascal, Nicolas Bancel, Éric Deroo, and Sandrine Lemaire (Eds.) (2002): Zoos humains. Au temps des exhibi- Nadim Jarjoura
tions humaines, La Découverte. (English (2008) Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Empire; German (2012):
Menschen Zoos. Schaufenster der Unmenschlichkeit. Les éditions du Crieur Public.)
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1
Revolution, in: Journalistik Journal, vol. 15, No. 1, p. 38–39 Animation will not remain an artform exclusive to feature films in Arab filmmaking. Arab
5. ___________ (2013): Islamberichterstattung negativ wie nie zuvor, in: EJO European Journalism Observatory, test3.ejo. filmmakers have been able to meet documentary filmmaking requirements within other
ch/?p=8005
dramatic contexts wherein beautiful language, investigation, and their treatment are as
6. Cheriaa, Taha (1966a): History of the Cinema N. Africa, in: Sadoul, Georges (ed.): The Cinema in Arab Countries. Arab
Film and Television Center, Beirut, pp. 108-114. important as the documental narration of reality. Some of these choose animation as a
7. ___________ (1966b): Film distribution in Tunisia, in: Sadoul, Georges (ed.): The Cinema in Arab Countries. Arab Film qualitative addition in a formal, expressive, and contextual way, contributing to the narra-
and Television Center, Beirut, pp. 158-163.
tion of stories or the telling of both memories and current reality. Arab documentaries are
8. ___________ (1966c): The encouragement of the N. African cinema, in: Sadoul, Georges (ed.): The Cinema in Arab Coun-
tries. Arab Film and Television Center, Beirut, pp. 219-224 now undergoing much innovative experimentation in animation. When examining different
9. Deltombe, Thomas (2016) : Deltombe: “L’islamophobie, un instrument de pouvoir qui permet de reformuler le racisme Arab stories, we see computer technology integrated in the making of sketches and the
d’antan”, in: Middle East Eye, édition française, 18.1.2016, www.middleeasteye.net/fr/reportages/deltombe-l-islamopho-
bie-un-instrument-de-pouvoir-qui-permet-de-reformuler-le-racisme-d imagined (integrated) in real-life events; furthermore, real-life characters are recreated
10. Éric Deroo (2002): Zoos Humains, France 52‘, French with English subtitles, www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SFMxa2IYU0 through the visual experimentation with individual destinies, embodied in documentaries
11. ___________ (2012): Das Kino als Zoowärter, (Le cinéma gardien du zoo, in: Blanchard, Pascal, Nicolas Bancel, Éric through sketched characters.
Deroo, and Sandrine Lemaire (Eds.) (2002): Zoos humains. Au temps des exhibitions humaines, La Découverte., pp. 380-
389.), quotes according to the German edition pp. 146-159 Using animation in Arab documentaries all across their various topics, working styles, and
12. Gillet, Camille (2016): La construction de l’islamophobie dans les médias, in: social.shorthand.com, social.shorthand. engagement with the artistic, dramatic, and aesthetic creates a cinematic state that requires
com/GILLETCamille1/nChzhvQqxY/la-construction-de-lislamophobie-dans-les-medias critical observation. The latter should not be reduced to the following examples, however;
13. Hafez, Kai and Carola Richter (2007): Das Gewalt- und Konfliktbild des Islams bei ARD und ZDF. Eine Untersuchung
öffentlich-rechtlicher Magazin- und Talksendungen. Universität Erfurt, Seminar für Medien- und Kommunikationswissen-
especially when we see various western documentary films using animation in works deeply
schaft, www.iisev.de/files/islam_ard_zdf.pdf engaged in current affairs and accommodating a diversity of lifestyles (some western docu-
14. Junge, Winfried (1975): Leipzig – ein weit geöffnetes Fenster. Interview mit dem Präsidenten und dem Vizepräsidenten der mentaries are entirely animated); and moreover, especially upon noticing increased efforts
Föderation arabischer Dokumentaristen, Salah Tohamy, Arabische Republik Ägypten, und A. Hamid Merei Syrische Arabische
Republik, in: Internationale Leipziger Dokumentar- und Kurzfilmwochen für Kino und Fernsehen (ed.): Protokoll der XVIII. to produce aesthetically deconstructive and well-animated Arab documentaries.
Internationalen Leipziger Dokumentar- und Kurzfilmwoche für Kino und Fernsehen 22. Bis 29. November 1975, pp 112-113.
15. Khleifi, Michel (2006): Michel Khleifi im Gespräch mit Irit Neidhardt, in: Theissl Verena and Volker Kull (ed.): Poeten,
Chronisten, Rebellen. Internationale DokumentarfilmerInnen im Gespräch, Schüren, pp. 270-275. 2
16. Köster, Bettina (2015): Geprägt von Stereotypen und Vorurteilen, in: DLF Aus Kultur und Sozialwissenschaften 18.6.2015, The significance in observing and critiquing the development of animation in Arab doc-
www.deutschlandfunk.de/islam-in-den-medien-gepraegt-von-stereotypen-und-vorurteilen.1148.de.html?dram:arti- umentaries lies within the following:
cle_id=322995
17. Neidhardt, Irit (2011): Co-Producing the Memory. Cinema Production between Europe and the Middle East. In: Global 1- The first incentive would be examining Arab documentaries’ cinematic skill, which aims
Media Journal. German Edition. Vol. 1, No. 1. www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/dbt_derivate_00022624/ to deconstruct collective memory while using entirely personal stories. As such, they un-
GMJ1_Neidhardt-final.pdf
ravel some of the individual and collective unconscious, and aesthetically and cinemati-
18. Ouarzazate Film Commission www.definitelyouarzazate.com/ofc.html
19. Royal Jordanian Film Commission www.film.jo
cally investigate and document the hushed, the forgotten, or the taboo. They investigate
20. Sadoul, Georges (ed.) (1966): The Cinema in Arab Countries. Arab Film and Television Centre, Beirut. the suppressed; repressed for political-ideological-religious-social considerations which
21. Salti, Rasha (ed.) (2006): Insights into Syrian Cinema. Essays and Conversations with Contemporary Filmmakers, Rat- perceive the past as a burden that is best left entirely avoided and forgotten; or because
tapallax Press and arte east.
advocates of said considerations imagine that with such measures they may impose
22. Scheffner, Philip (2007): The Halfmoon Files, Germany 87’, German and English, DVD with subtitles in English, French,
Arabic et. alt. oblivion/forgetfulness upon everyone.
23. Schneiders, Thorsten Gerald (2014): „Wir“ und „die Anderen“, in: qantara.de de.qantara.de/inhalt/islambild-in- 2 – Resorting to animation in Arab documentaries often springs from the director’s per-
deutschen-medien-wir-und-die-anderen
sonal need. It is an “aesthetic” obsession with this visual art form; it sees animation as
24. Stegemann, Patrick (2013): Islambild in deutschen Medien: schwer depressiv mit Katersymptomen, in: Alsharq Blog,
www.alsharq.de/2013/medien/der-islam-deutschen-medien-schwer-depressiv-mit-katersymptomen/ a cinematic experiment and a cultural and aesthetic challenge; it manifests a desire to
25. Theissl Verena and Volker Kull (ed.)(2006): Poeten, Chronisten, Rebellen. Internationale DokumentarfilmerInnen im exercise new techniques in the making of Arab cinema in general and documentary cinema
Gespräch, Schüren.
in specific. Otherwise, it springs from dramatic, artistic, or aesthetic stipulations needed
26. UNESCO Constitution portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=15244&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
within the general context; or from a mere specific “mood” that wishes to try this genre
27. Vincente, Miguel, Miguel Otero, Pablo López and Miguel Pardo (2010): The Image of the Arab and the Muslim World in
the Spanish Media. Special edition: Fundación Tres Culturas del Mediterráneo.

48 49
 of visual work, attempting to fathom animation’s dramatic ranges and its potential of
complementing documentary scripts, stories, milieus, and observations.
3 – The third incentive would be to observe the aesthetics of animation; even though the
dedicated spaces for its appearance in dramatised Arab documentaries are quite few
when compared with those found in conventional documentary arrangements.
4 – Documentaries (whether partially or fully animated or not) break away from the clas-
sical tradition of examining selected materials. Documentaries belong – whether their
directors choose to use animation in their works or not – to the cinematic genre that
mixes the documentary with the imagined, and aligns information, disclosure, and details
with visual feature films, which themselves sprout from real stories. As such, animation
facilitates the expression of some of the imagined, complementing documentation by
narrating some of it through various cinematic images.
3 First, the visual stimulation such cinematic genre provides calls our attention to a
The following visual samples do not invalidate other experiences or experiments; rather,
they offer an overview of a production reality whose presence is growing in the making of
contemporary Arab documentaries. Furthermore, they highlight a creative act in develop-
ing the language and making of animation and its cinematic integration into documentary
contexts of story-telling and narration.
Some Arab documentary filmmakers share in common their personal tendency to use
animation. As such, it tends to aesthetically please them and provide them with differ-
ent visual potentials that translate their cinematic requirements. As such, aesthetics is
sufficient reason for using animation – in order to create a modern product (all the while
noting that some of their other documentaries are not invested in animation, whether for
lack of production, lack of a clear artistic and visual vision at the time, their incapability
of finding the required visual formulas that interweave animation with documentation,
or their inability to achieve such formulas upon the availability of said required formu-
las, etc.). The presence of imagined narration in the filmmakers’ documentary vision;
along with their different western influences whose animation replaces real characters
in drawing the features of the story, situation, or theme; are two incentives behind their
employment of animation and testing its effects in their documentary treatment.
The first example is Waves (2013) by Egyptian director Ahmed Nour. The director states
that the main incentive for his use of animation is that the processed part is present in
his imagination in a way which “other forms are incapable of achieving, especially on a
metaphoric level.” He adds that some simple details which “perhaps no one but me would
notice during the first viewing, and which immensely interest me, cannot be adequately
brought out without animation.”
The second example is The Wheels of War (2015) by Lebanese director Rami Kodeih.
Kodeih was influenced by animation very early in life, which was possibly the only incentive
behind experimenting with animation in this film of his. It is also important to note that
the long wait for the film had resulted from lack of funding and projects that provide spac-
es for animation. From Japan to Europe to Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003),
50
whose various animated scenes have been created “ in an extremely wonderful way,”
Kodeih scoops culture, awareness, aesthetics, knowledge, and techniques before exper-
imenting with animation for the first time in this documentary of his.
The third example is Ghost Hunting (2017) by Palestinian director Raed Andoni. The
director has a deep urge to link his own personal experience with the subject here, starting
from the very first moments of the story narration. Before the opening credits roll, an an-
imated 18-year-old boy appears — the animated director — , tied up in a square, followed
by the director’s appearance in his present state sitting at a vanity table: “I reach out to
the animated boy. I ask his name. I cover his head once more, and go. Then the film starts.”
4
The purely personal drive is an essential factor behind the choice to use animation. How-
ever, this drive is linked to three questions:
myriad of potentials that could determine the film’s course, the destiny of its characters,
or the narration of dramatic contexts told in documentary language.
Second, the director considers animation an exercise of creation; inventing an imagined
narrational state of occurrences and facts that strays from documentary conventions – all
the while noting that documentary engagement is currently very developed – a state that
liberates Arab documentary cinema from its bygone classicism.
Third, the director wishes to transform the animated pictures in his documentary into
an integrated cinematic, cultural, and human state centred on mocking reality and destiny
and visually predicting situations that could have unfolded. Ones that could have unfolded
were the filmed characters allowed to finish a past experiment, for instance, and perhaps
manifest the prospects of a scientific invention, as is the case in The Lebanese Rocket
Society (2013) by Lebanese directors Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige.
In other words, the purely personal is central to approaching animation as an integrated
cinematic world inside an innovative documentary text, liberated from its conventional
working methods. Ahmed Nour – in telling the Suez stories (Egypt), its transformations,
tragedies, and engagements — insists that animating parts of the text stems from personal
cinematic preferences; he does so neither for lack of archival footage from that moment
of his life, city life, and its people, nor for the sake of minimising production costs, as
is mentioned in different commentaries: “The archive is available, and animation costs
are bigger than those needed for feature filmmaking.” Therefore, animation appears in
entire scenes as an expression of different questions: transforming reality into drawings
that coalesce in their dramatic and aesthetic structures and open up to a statement that
completely differs from familiar documentary narration. As such, many animated shots
refer either to a close observation of the director’s fears, questions, nightmares, confu-
sions, and search for that which is hidden in the homeland’s and people’s memory, or to
events that often find further freedom of disclosure and profound aesthetic statement
in animation, be that in relations, details, and margins.
As regards Raed Andoni, he reconstructs “Al-Maskubiya” (The Russian Compound) in
51
 Nadim Jarjoura (born 1965) is a
occupied Jerusalem and works with its Palestinians prisoners over different periods of journalist and film critic since
time, eventually performing – alongside the director himself who is present in that context, 1984. He started his career in the
its details and spaces – all their states of being, agitations, moods, dreams, nightmares, now-defunct Beirut daily Assa-
suffering, concerns, and pains they have lived as former prisoners. They now re-enact fir, and joined the Qatari daily,
them before the documenting camera. Animation here springs from Andoni’s deep desire
Al-Arabi Al-Jadid, in 2016. He has
to distinguish between the purely personal (animation) and general content (former pris-
published articles and essays in
oners performing their real roles before the documentary camera): “(Through animation),
various Arab magazines such
I journey into the subconscious, or my own unconscious wherein the imprisoned boy lives.
It is a documentary character that lives in my own unconscious,” Andoni states, adding that
as Al Arabi, Nazwa, Cinema and
the following “animation is linked to him; the image enters the boy’s subconscious, the Doha where his articles are still
unconscious. It is as if we have journeyed into the unconscious of the unconscious. That is, appearing. He is the author of a
into the fantasy of fantasy.” number of publications and his
In its own way, The Wheels of War – a cinematic space where former Lebanese com- repertoire includes: The current
batants’ past meets with their contradictory present – enjoys a wide space of animation state of Lebanese cinema, The
that resembles a human space for those motorists (all those former combatants) or for 9/11’s crime on the Big Screen,
the director himself. Otherwise, it activates a wider scope of freedom as it experiments The perforated façade: a person-
with animation’s ability to adapt itself to a script laden with a heavy, violent, and tough al journey to Arab festivals, The
past. It embraces it with all its heaviness, all the while washing its hands – off of it and unfinished chronicle: a research public on par with the personal in an accurate
within it – through forming friendships with “yesterday’s enemies,” eliciting, consolidating, attempt to delve into the story depths, horizons,
in the history of Lebanese cine-
and polishing them. Animation sometimes traces the footsteps of the cinematic itself labyrinths, and oral scripts and transformations,
ma, Lebanese cinema in 2003: A
in following and searching with the former for their memories, wounds, magnanimity of and into the individual self — the director’s firstly
great deal of documentaries and
past and present – and in this film, it introduces colours that reflect the bitterness of the but also the individuals’ in the story — in order
self and its liberation; its present forms that enhance the performance of the confession
short films and an encourag- to incentivise disclosure, expression, and con-
before the director’s lens. ing feature film movement and fession.
Questioning oneself. He was also Similarly, The Wheels of War in its purely
5 a jury member at the 2016 Trip- cinematic and documentary dimension, extends
A different incentive may be traced when considering the “purely personal” in Ahmed oli Film Festival and a FIPRESCI the human, aesthetic, and dramatic through
Nour’s Waves. The Egyptian director prefers not to limit his work to cinematic moulds, juror at the Dubai International the employment of animation which somehow
despite perceiving some of them and their employment in a documentary context as an Film Festival 2011. translates much of the original script’s details.
interesting and engaging experience: “I am constantly excited about intermixing forms As such, animation retrieves the Lebanese com-
every time I have a palate for it in my film, despite any dramatic stipulations or intellec- batants’ past during the Lebanese civil war
tual theorisations.” He says that he is “a director who tells stories through a world he (1975-1990). They are former political enemies
creates. Even if the story is documental, my main interest lies within narrating it in a way and members of opposing militias; they journey into their past through a present encap-
that I enjoy first of all, while maintaining an honest presentation of the truth, naturally.” sulated in meeting “yesterday’s enemies” in a current state that has been created from
As opposed to Raed Andoni’s retrieval of experiences of imprisonment in “Al-Maskubi- the disappointments of the past, its pains, and conflicts. It has also been created once
ya” prison, which is considered one of the toughest and most violent Israeli prisons; they realise all the latter, especially when seen in light of their common denominator,
Ahmed Nour goes to Suez in order to relate chapters that have been silenced in the collec- manifest in their obsession with motorcycles and their universe, mechanisms, meanings,
tive memory of a neglected area by the ruling Egyptian authorities, despite its well-known and desires.
history in resisting Israeli occupation prior to and throughout the 1973 “October War,” as
well as the horrible suffering maintained all throughout the years due to its neglect and 6
abandonment. However, as in Ghost Hunting, Waves — both aesthetically and cine- In the three aforementioned films, animation plays two main roles that participate in
matically (and animation is to be credited too for consolidating such equality) — puts the cinematic aesthetics, crafted with impressive technical, artistic, and dramatic skill:

52 53

The first is the directors’ visual exercise that tests the horizons of animation and its
potential in translating purely personal desires in reading a documentary script and
rendering it a coherent and well-rounded cinematic act.
The second is concerned with a technical engagement open to accurate choices of co-
lour, form, milieu, background, and characters, as well as their sketching. Its integration
reflects an aesthetic liveliness in completing the bigger picture whose details are narrated
as such by the filmmaker.
Accordingly, animation masterfully achieves its two roles in those three films, pleasing
the eye, stirring imagination, and creating excitement. One which pulls further attention
to details of the original script, its narration, and its passages onto the aesthetics of
animation and its (positive) influences on the milieu, content, and viewing altogether. In
the Lebanese Rocket Society, it takes another cinematic approach as it completes a
speculative state, imagined by the duo Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, dropping it
towards the end of the film as an expression of two things:
First, painting a picture of where the Lebanese state could have arrived should the
students of Haigazian University and their professors have been allowed to finish their
scientific invention at the beginning of the 1960s, which was embodied in the invention
of a long-range rocket.
Second, mocking a reality constituted in undermining the experience and dreams of
the involved youth and their enthusiasm, along with professors endowed with no less
enthusiasm, work, and industriousness.
The Lebanese Rocket Society retrieves – with references, documents, and direct meet-
ings with some of the event makers, in addition to photographic pictures and visual
recordings — that story, which had not “shaken” the country only (on social, political,
security, and academic levels), but also the country’s surroundings, from Syria to Israel to
Cyprus to their interlinked international networks; for how could a country like Lebanon
be allowed to make a rocket in a troubled geographic region? And how could “college
students” cause all that?
As such, animation in the last part of The Lebanese Rocket Society expresses
unfulfilled hopes and repressed desires, as well as unaccomplished expectations. Ani-
mation here, with its colours and working technique prone to sarcasm, is a tightly-knit
artistic, technical, and aesthetic structure, and is cinematically well-made, centred around
inventing a non-existent state, through cynical language.
7 and Sanad.
These models open up a discussion around the developing language in Arab documentary
filmmaking, its skill in delving into the inscrutabilities of the hidden and silenced ques-
tions; into aesthetic experimentation with animation. These few examples follow such
progressive path of documentary filmmaking, its conditions, questions, and aesthetics.
And they were picked here for their aesthetic ability to contain the significance of both
industry and animation.
(Please note that the directors’ abovementioned quotes are exclusive to this article.)
54
From Agitprop and Expository
Observation to Dissident
Subjectivity? The Arab
Documentary before and
after the Arab Uprising
Viola Shafik
The Arabellion has come to be seen as an unequivocal marker of cultural change, a
decisive point, both in spite of and due to the disastrous circumstances surrounding
it, which have commanded a great deal of both media and analytical attention with
regard to cultural development across the Middle East and North Africa. Consequently,
the question arises, if and how this shift has impacted film production in these regions.
Looking at the mediascape of the Arab World, it is evident that the uprising that started
in Tunisia in December 2010 was preceded (and since followed) by a surge of innovation
within the fields of independent art house, avant-garde and non-televised documentary
film making. The last decade has seen the production of a huge variety of films in a wide
range of formats, which have been circulated, largely, via the internet, as well as through
the arthouse and festival circuit. Moreover, these filmmakers have not merely dealt with
revolutionary themes but have also been experimental with stylistic and narrative forms
(cf. Shafik, 2016; Marks, 2015).
Naturally, each of the film-producing Arab countries, namely Lebanon, Syria, Jordan,
Iraq, the Arab peninsula, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco has had its own unique
experience and response, however a number of crucial common denominators may be
detected. Perhaps the most evident is the mutual exchange of information, know-how and
audio-visual material, through transnational Arab television and social media, both of
which were boosted by the uprising. This pattern of exchange was also fostered through
the increase in pan-Arab and European funding and training initiatives, which tended to
be directed to the whole region. These include funds such as the Arab Fund for Arts and
Culture (AFAC), the Doha Film Institute, Enjaaz, DOX BOX, and more short-lived schemes,
such as the Beirut Screen Institute, Doc Med, Documentary Campus MENA Programme
Without a doubt, this unique historical moment has played an important role in engen-
dering a ‘revolutionary’ attitude among cinéastes. One aspect of this is a new commitment
to independent production forms and creative solutions. For instance, the formation of
film collectives enables the production of a plethora of innovative forms: interventionist,
fly-on-the-wall, guerilla-style, rhetorical agitprop, poetic, performative, self-referential
and reflexive avant-garde. Even autobiographies, historical reenactments and fake doc-
umentaries have complemented the picture. Nevertheless, the majority of Arab docu-
mentary films produced within the last decade adhere to traditional modes, namely the
55
 expository (rhetorical), participatory (subjective) and the observational (direct cinema).
As Bill Nichols identified in his Introduction to Documentary (2000), these modes – to
which he added the poetic, reflexive and performative – differ in two ways. Firstly, in
the way they use evidence and the indexical nature of the cinematographic image as an
argument about history and reality, and, secondly, the method by which they resolve the
basic dynamics of communication between subject, filmmaker and audience; namely, who
speaks to whom about whom.
In the Arab region, the documentary format has developed similar modes, albeit in a
temporally delayed manner due to the significant obstacles it had first to overcome: First,
colonialism, leading to poor official planning and a lack of infrastructure, educational
and financial means. These macro difficulties are compounded by the cultural relativism
between local communities and varying rates of development; for example, Egypt became
the host of the first film industry of the region while in other Arab countries, by and large,
‘national’ cinemas did not appear until after decolonisation. In many of these nations,
filmmaking, and particularly documentary filmmaking, originated in the embrace of the
state, both economically and intellectually, meaning that dissident and innovative film-
makers thus had a very difficult time achieving anything within the confines of the system.
The key to evading these restrictions lay either in becoming economically indepen-
dent and/or looking for alternative financing sources, such as television or civil society.
Filmmakers who selected this route began to emerge in the 1970s and 1980s. Egyptian
filmmaker Attiat El-Abnoudi was one of the first to acquire her own 16mm equipment. She
resorted to European co-production and the support of NGOs to be able to finance her
films. Others, like Egyptian women filmmakers Tahani Rachid and Safaa Fathy, who were
based abroad, relied entirely on their host countries for the production of their documen-
taries. The same applies to Palestinian director Michel Khleifi or the late Tunisian director
Mustapha Hasnaoui. Many Algerian filmmakers became dependant on France during the
1990s, after the outbreak of the Civil war, and the most acknowledged Algerian documenta-
rist of today, Malek Bensmail, is still based there. Often, Moroccan documentary directors,
like Ali Essafi and Hakim Belabbes, either started their careers abroad or still live there.
Unlike in Germany, France and the UK — wherein gradual privatisation on a massive
scale starting in the mid-1980s led to certain TV channels, such as ZDF, la sept and Channel
4 playing a major role in supporting and producing documentaries on the national and
transnational level — most national broadcasters in the Arab World did little or nothing
to produce or air critical, innovative films, with the laudable exception of 2M (Moroccan
TV). The introduction of transnational Arab TV channels — most notably Al-Jazeera and
MBC, which launched specific documentary channels — did boost production, however
the benefits were confined largely to TV reportage and didactic infotainment.
Fortunately, the spread of digital technology has led to a steep reduction in production
costs and contributed to the spread of independent and experimental video art, as well
as deconstructive, subjective and self-reflexive approaches. Additionally, the Gulf region,
particularly the Emirates and Qatar, have started to develop their own audio-visual sec-
tors by establishing festivals, co-production markets, film funds and adding to Semat and
56
Beirut DC, training initiatives created in the 1990s in Egypt and in Lebanon.
This is the landscape in which filmmakers have found themselves, both during and
since the rebellion and which they must navigate going forward.
A collective spirit
It must be underlined that decentralisation and collectivism played a major role, shortly
before and after the revolt, in promoting artistic activities as a means of finding creative
solutions to obstacles surrounding film production and the voicing of dissident opinions.
The Syrian Abounaddara collective (The Man with the Glasses), which was founded in 2010
by self-trained filmmakers, started producing anonymous shorts during the uprising in
Syria, representing different political camps while focussing primarily on human com-
monalities. The videos were made accessible via the group’s website.
Other countries likewise saw the formation of film collectives, for example Exit in Tunisia
(no longer active), Figleaf Studios, Rufy’s and al-Hasala in Egypt. The latter was created
in 2010 to facilitate the production of Hala Lotfi’s Coming Forth by Day and has since
produced several other documentaries, most notably Mother of the Unborn (2014)
by Nadine Salib. Similarly, the collectively run alternative film centre, Cimatheque in Cairo,
which is equipped with a screening hall, film lab, archive and library, was created around
the production of Tamir El-Said’s feature film, The Last Days of the City (2016).
El-Said was also involved in the dormant citizen-journalism collective, Mosireen, found-
ed by the actor Khalid Abdalla (The Kite Runner, 2007) and others in 2011. Its members
dedicated themselves to recording and disseminating short, sometimes unedited, videos
on the Egyptian uprising. Eventually they created an archive for related footage. Some,
depicting blatant atrocities committed by security forces, had a relatively strong online
circulation and were at times even used by news agencies. Three members of the collec-
tive, Philip Rizk, Yasmina Metwally and Salma al-Tarzi have all since completed their debut
feature length documentaries. The collective insist upon the crucial subjectivity of their
representation. As one of its members stated in an interview: “We don’t claim to be objec-
tive. We are extremely subjective. We consider ourselves a form of counter-propaganda of
what you get from the government news agencies here in Egypt.” (www.filmingrevolution.
org/clip/400/intro_to_mosireen).
This insistence on subjectivity, along with the move to release films on the uprising on-
line, as a means of circumventing traditional media outlets, has also been adopted by indi-
vidual ‘citizen journalists’ elsewhere. Most notably, Moroccan Nadir Bouhmouch, who chose
an online release for his documentary, My al-Makhzen and Me (2012). It’s a personal
account, narrated by the director, about a student who returned from the United States in
2011, to document the political activism that had started to spread in his homeland. The
film discusses this student (the filmmaker) and others’ ambivalent relationship with the
political system as embodied by al-Makhzan and the King. Bouhmouch’s family history
and his reflections on his own class status forms an integral part of his solidarity with
the February 18 movement and forcefully underline the slogan: the personal is political!
This is not to say that Bouhmouch has opted exclusively for the first-person narration
57
 throughout his career. His subsequent film, 4 7 5 (2013), also an agitprop, denounces law
475, which pardons a rapist if he marries his victim. Here he uses the voice of his female
co-author and protagonist (herself a rape survivor) as a concerned and poetic narrator,
both on and off-screen. Unlike agitprop films of the previous decades, Bouhmouch does
not revert to the anonymous, objectifying voice of an omniscient narrator, opting for a
participatory tone instead.
History and Memory between Agitprop and Reenactment
Agitprop, a term coined from ‘agitation’ and ‘propaganda’, originally denoted the com-
munist propaganda of the early Soviet Union, although it has since come to describe any
kind of highly politicised art. In the Arab context, the approach of independent agitprop
is rhetorical, if not counter-propagandistic; directly or indirectly aiming to elucidate and
reveal past and current events (or to unfold what is enfolded, to use Laura Marks termi-
nology; Marks: 2015) and facts that have been repressed or forgotten about within the
dominant official discourse. It is partisan as it accuses those in power for their abuses,
sides with whom it considers victims and uses the medium of film as an argument with
which to win over and convince its audience.
A topical and taboo breaking film within this category is Tarik El-Idrissi’s, Rif 58-59 –
Breaking the Silence (2014). The film combines archival footage with moving testi-
monies of eye-witnesses who, in their early youth, observed the merciless oppression
with which Moroccan authorities met the insurgence in the Rif region in 1958-59. This
aggression against its own people has remained one of the biggest taboo subjects in
Morocco, until very recently. El-Idrissi’s film addresses the demands for recognition and
reconciliation which are a reaction to decades of intentional cultural, social and economic
neglect of the region by the government.
That historical accounts cannot be detached from present day realities is also made
clear by Cursed be the Phosphate (2012) by Sami Tlili. It deals with the 2008 revolt
in the so-called Phosphate Triangle in Tunisia, depicting the thwarted hopes of those
involved and persecuted for their involvement in this early unrest and how they were
left behind, even since the 2011 revolution. In a similar vein, A Feeling Greater Than
Love (2017) by Mary Jirmanus Saba is one of the rare films to sketch out the fights and
contradictions of the communist workers’ movement in Lebanon in the early 1970s. Its
fragmentary form and deconstructive attitude clearly evokes the injustice that has been
done to the individuals concerned, while at the same time depicting the failure of the
surrounding discourse.
Recent Lebanese documentaries have also been eager to investigate historical events,
but by means of reconstructing and reflecting, rather than agitprop. Sometimes this is
achieved with humour, like The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012) by Joana Hadjithomas
and Khalil Joreige. Or soberly, such as Sector Zero (2011) by Nadim Mishlawi, which
investigates the history of a Beirut neighbourhood that was subjected to several waves
of ethnic cleansing. Sleepless Nights (2012) by Eliane Raheb confronts the parallel
stories of a perpetrator and a victim of ethnic violence during the Civil war in Lebanon.
58
In This Land Lay Graves of Mine (2015) by Reine Mitri offers an investigation into the
demographic changes in Lebanon following forced and voluntary displacement. Generally
these films use testimonies, archival material and, at times, a subjective voice-over to
translate their intentions.
Yet another way to approach history was demonstrated by Malek Bensmaïl, with Le
chine est encore loi (China is Still Far, 2010). He observes and talks to the
inhabitants of a little Algerian village where, half a century ago, an incident took place
that ignited the war of liberation. His observations enable us to question both past and
present times — to seek the past in the present and vice versa — which is also a strategy
applied by films which reenact historical events or private traumata. Rania Rafei and
Raed Rafei, in their film 74 (The Reconstruction of a Struggle; 2011), gathered
a group of young Lebanese to reenact an unsuccessful political student sit-in that took
place in the American University in Beirut in 1974. Later, two Mosireen-members, Philip
Rizk and Yasmina Metwally, organised Out in the Streets (2015), a theatre workshop
with unemployed men from a workers’ neighbourhood in Cairo, to reenact their individual
experiences in the factories that they and their families work in.
Emotionally riveting, Ghost Hunting (2017) by Raed Andoni, involves a number of
former political prisoners, who endured interrogation and torture in Israeli prisons. The
intention was to shoot the interactions within a faithfully created filmset of the prisons in
which they had been kept. In the process of shifting and exchanging the roles of victims
and perpetrators, the extremity of their past psychic and physical experiences became
evident, manifesting in a kind of radical subjectivity that oscillates between documen-
tation and fiction, inviting identification whilst at the same time revealing the very thin
line that divides human empathy from cruelty.
A completely different approach to history is offered by two films based on found
footage. In Search of Oil and Sand (2012), by Wael Omar, uses amateur film shot by
members and friends of the then royal family of Egypt shortly before the ousting of the
King in 1952, as a pretext to discussing the extreme social change which has occurred since
then. Off Frame (2017), by Mohanad Yaqubi, is a compilation film, using clips from films
that formed part of a Palestinian film archive which vanished during the Israeli invasion
of Beirut in 1982. In contrast to Qaiss al-Zubaidi’s classical expository film, Palestine:
Chronicle of a People (1984), it does not denounce Zionism and the injustice that has
been done to the Palestinians in any voice-over commentary. Instead, it relies on montage
alone. Through the choice of clips and their contrasts, it brings out the evolution of certain
ideological discourses and representational politics linked to the Palestinian question.
New Media Aesthetics
While films like Sector Zero and Rif 58-59 cherish intrinsically cinematic qualities —
long takes, careful framing and controlled camera movements — many films by post-rev-
olution Syrian directors (often produced by Bidayat), display a New Media aesthetic that
doesn’t shy away from using “dirty” images. That is, grainy, shaky material shot on consum-
er cameras or even mobile-phones, Skype-interviews and anonymous footage uploaded
59

© DOX BOX, Photo: Bernhard Ludewig
to the internet. Films like Mohamed Ali Attasi’s
travelogue, Our Terrible Country (2014),
H aunted (2015) by Liwaa Yazji and H ouses
without Doors (2016) by Avo Kaprealian.
Ziad Kalthoum’s The Immortal Sergeant
(2014) is a particularly interesting example as
it indirectly reflects the widening gap between
pre- and post-revolutionary Syrian cinema.
Kalthoum’s film starts with mobile-phone foot-
age captured clandestinely by the young direc-
tor, during his military service at the beginning
of the revolt. Later, as assistant director to Mo-
hamed Malas during the shooting of A Ladder
to Damascus (2013), Kalthoum documents the
extremely difficult shooting conditions of the old
master’s film, punctuated by explosions, helicop-
ters, desperate passers-by obstructing film and
sound recordings, and traumatised crew mem-
bers on the verge of collapse, having suffered
detention themselves or lost loved ones. Amidst
this havoc, Malas himself seems somewhat remote and artificial, particularly when he
responds to queries in classical Arabic.
Silvered Water (2014), which portrays the long and extraordinarily painful process
by which the early Syrian protests turned into a ferocious civil war, is reconstructed in an
intellectually reflexive and, at the same time, poetic way. It is directed, as it says in the
60
Viola Shafik, PhD, a freelance
filmmaker, film curator, and film
scholar holds the position of
a researcher at the Art History
Dept. of Ludwig Maximillian Uni-
versity, Munich and is currently
researching aspects of the histo-
ry of Arab documentary. She au-
thored among others Arab Cine-
ma: History and Cultural Identity,
AUC-Press, Cairo (1998/2016)
and Popular Egyptian Cinema:
Gender, Class and Nation, AUC-
Press (2007). She lectured at the
American University in Cairo, the
Zürich University, the Humboldt
University and the Ludwig Max-
imilian University. She was the
Head of Studies of the Docu-
mentary Campus MENA Program
2011-2013, worked as a consul-
tant for La Biennale di Venezia
and the Dubai Film Connection,
and was a member of the selec-
tion committees of the al-Rawi
Screenwriters Lab, the Doha Film
Institute, as well as the World
Cinema Fund (Berlinale). She di-
rected several documentaries,
most notably J annat ’ A li -
A li im Paradies /My N ame
is not A li (2011) and A rij –
Scent of Revolution (2014).
credits, “by Oussama Mohammed, Wiam Simav Bedirxan, 1001 Syrians and me”. It relies
mainly on iconic footage from the Internet that has documented pivotal events and inhu-
mane practices. As the film progresses, it is complemented and eventually overlapped by
fragmentary observations from besieged Homs, provided by young female Kurdish docu-
mentary filmmaker Wiam Simav Bedirxan. She had contacted Mohammed at the end of 2011,
asking for his advice on filming after she was able to smuggle a camera into the war zone.
Her material of the destroyed city radiates a profound intimacy, as she not only documents
the ruins but has an eye for small details. Thus, she collects haunting images of stray pets,
dogs, cats — injured, starving, or dying — victims of the shelling. More heart-breaking still
is her portrait of little Omar, a four-to-five-year-old boy whom she follows on one occasion
to the grave of his father, as he speaks about the flowers he has brought. Bedirxan’s own
dialogue with the little boy, and their common strolls through the rubble, watching out for
snipers, collecting flowers or mulberries, builds an emotional intensity which is reflected in
the dialogue between mentor Mohammed and his virtual protégé. Similarly, by Mohammed’s
comments, in which he questions the nature of film and image, ruminating on the way the
officers of the regime stage torture sessions and how they thus become film directors in
their own way. Both films, Silvered Water and The Immortal Sergeant, include the
voice of the filmmakers as affected and subjective narrators.
Revolutionary Cinema?
Not everything that purports to be revolutionary is necessarily revolutionary. In other
words, films on revolution are often unlike formally “revolutionary” cinema, such as the
transgressive and innovative forms described by Amos Vogler in Film als subversive Kunst
(Film as a Subversive Art, 1997). Many of the documentary films which appeared in the
immediate wake of the uprising had difficulties distinguishing themselves, formally, from
the general news and reportage that dominated that period, covering tear gas clashes,
chanting masses, martyrs and heroic individual resistance. The Tunisian documentaries
Rouge Parole (Red Speech, 2012) by Elyes Baccar, No More Fear (2011) by Mourad Ben
Cheikh, and Dégage! (Get Lost!; 2012) by Mohamed Zran are, on the one hand, chronolo-
gies of the revolt and the subsequent struggles between the old system and, on the other,
the desire for liberation and democracy. They focus on events in the streets and the mass
protests (although No More Fear also features select contemporary witnesses), produc-
ing a levelling effect that approximates the television images broadcast during that time.
This also applies to films that achieved significant commercial success. Most notably,
The Square (2013), by Jehane Noujaim, an American of Egyptian origin, was nominated
for an Oscar and created a stir because Egyptian censorship supposedly tried to obstruct
its screening during a festival in Egypt, even after one version of the film had already
circulated on YouTube. Noujaim’s protagonists are almost exclusively male activists of
varying social, cultural and ideological backgrounds, from liberal, such as Khaled Abdalla,
the founder of Mosireen, to Islamist, middle and lower class, of whom the youngest and
least privileged also serves as narrator. Without ever documenting her own interaction
with her protagonists , Noujaim followed them around for two years, largely during rallies
61
 and other gatherings, listening to their statements and showing the ups and downs of the
uprising, until counter revolution took control in the summer of 2013.
In The Square, the narration is moulded into a dramatised struggle between revolu-
tionaries and security forces, supporters of freedom and their oppressors. The moments of
set-backs and the personal disappointments of the protagonists allow for identification and
empathy. The revolution becomes a great spectacle, the square the arena for a manichean
battle. Meanwhile, the lack of overt interference from the side of the filmmaker approaches
the classic American direct cinema model of Leacock, Pennebaker and Drew, among others.
This, “New York Direct Cinema version, which was deeply implicated in the establishment
discourse of journalistic objectivity, this quality of observation-without-intervention be-
came one of the key claims of its truth-value” (Chanan, 2007: 177). Indeed, a reflexive film
like Silvered Water, in which the dialogue between its two authors allows for a reflection on
their choices about the film and the imagery used to promote it in the media, particularly
on the Internet, perhaps allows it to be less affirmative and polarising than The Square.
Observational films before and after the revolution
The directors of some Syrian war films, like Talal Derki, who made Return to Homs
(2013), also prefer an observational mode while following their protagonists through the
conflict. This allows them to record the atrocities, to give evidence and create intensity,
on the spot. In the Arab World direct cinema was largely concerned with representing the
living circumstances of the less privileged. Yet it remained exceptional for a long time as,
technically, it could only be adopted relatively late due to the high costs of production
and post-production of celluloid. Hashim El-Nahas and Attiat El-Abnoudi in Egypt as well
as Ahmed El-Maanouni in Morocco, Sophie Ferchiou in Tunisia, Jocelyne Saab, Mai Masri
and Jean Chamoun started in the late 1970s and early 1980s, however it took until the shift
to electronic and subsequently digital to allow clear, observational film to spread and to
include a larger range of topics.
Often the films combine observation with interviews and/or narration by one of the
protagonists. Examples abound of these portraits of exceptional characters, such as At-
tiat al-Abnoudi’s Permissible Dreams (1982; Egypt) about a resolute peasant woman,
Mohamad Soueid’s Cinema Fouad (1994) about a transgender Syrian, Yasmine (1996)
by Nizar Hassan about a woman involved in a crime of honour, A Woman Taxi Driver
at Sidi Bel Abbès (2000; Algeria) by Belkacem Hadjadj, Tahani Rachid’s These Girls
(2005; Egypt) about homeless teenage girls, Hichem Ben Ammar’s Choft Ennoujoum
Fil Quaïla (I Saw Stars, 2006; Tunisia) about boxers, Dalila Ennadre’s J’ai tant aimé
(I Loved So Much, 2008) about a Moroccan prostitute who served in the French army,
Recycle (2007; Jordan) by Mahmoud al-Massad about an Islamist from al-Zarqa, Diana
El-Jeiroudi’s Dolls: A Woman from Damascus (2008; Syria) about a housewife, The
One Man Village (2008; Lebanon) by Simone El-Habre about his uncle, Living Skin
(2010; Egypt) by Fawzi Saleh on boys working in the tanneries and Saken (2014; Jordan)
by Sandra Madi, about a paralysed freedom fighter and, last but not the least, Honey,
Dust and Rain (2016, UAE) by Emirati poet Nujoom Elghanem among others.
62
This hybrid technique also prevailed in films set at the time of revolution.
Cairo Drive (2014) by Sherif Elkatsha, focusses on traffic in Cairo, following a few
characters from different backgrounds around the chaotic streets of the metropolis over
a long period of time, dissecting the social fabric and its destabilising factors, such as
corruption and nepotism. The film starts before the uprising and extends well beyond
it, thereby documenting the effects of the rebellion on the public sphere. Unlike The
Square, Cairo Drive doesn’t constrain its characters in a clear-cut antagonistic battle,
but highlights their overall frustrations and the small compromises required in order to
survive within the system.
Some of the most radical post-revolution direct cinema examples, however, have
been imbued by a sense of marginality. Hinde Boujemaa’s Tunisian documentary film, It
was Better Tomorrow (2012), offers a long-form observation of a homeless Tunisian
woman, witnessing her breaking into empty homes, squatting, being thrown back onto
the street, going to prison, all while sharing her life story, which encompasses sexual
abuse in early childhood and familial rejection. The middle-class director admits that it
was the revolution that made her embrace this form, as she confesses to having lived in
the clouds under Ben Ali’s government. The unrest gave her the opportunity to confront
a side of her country and its people that she had never known before.
Another, even more radical, film stems from the collective, Exit, represented by Ismaël,
Youssef Chebi and Ala Eddine Slim. Their common film, Babylon (2012), documents the
construction and subsequent dismantling of a Tunisian refugee camp near the Libyan
border, without commentary or even subtitles, through long observational shots. In the
process, they depict the major and minor adversities and pleasures of the refugees,
as well those of their supervisors from countries throughout the world, ranging from
Bangladesh to West Africa, situating them in relation to the harsh natural environment
of the surrounding desert. The film deliberately avoids rendering the camp’s prevailing
linguistic chaos accessible through subtitles or any other means of translation, so that
the audience, too, remain helplessly exposed to the camp’s babel effect. This collective
work features the same distance from, if not suspicion of, the spoken word that is found
in an earlier film by one of the trio, namely Ala Eddine Slim’s short film The Stadium
(2010), produced back in the period of the dictatorship.
Participatory and first-person narratives
The question of language, voice and way of speaking is crucial to most of the documen-
taries mentioned so far. While expository films, like newsreels and reportages, may say:
We speak about them to you, other films exhibit a different attitude towards the triangle
of subject, object and receiver. The observational direct cinema, for instance, is eager to
hide and neutralise the speaking I or we, unlike the participatory mode that signals we
speak about ourselves to you. The performative mode extends this position to we speak
about ourselves to us (Nichols, 2001: 133-4), while the reflexive mode’s main concern is
to question and destabilise that triangle altogether.
Yet not all films conceal the involvement of the filmmaker, and their limited human
63
 scope. Tahrir 2011: The Good, the Bad, and the Politician (2011), which included
contributions by Tamer Ezzat, Ayten Amin and Amro Salama, presents portraits of individ-
uals, a photojournalist and an activist that offer little in the way of counter argument to
the deluge of inflammatory images from the new media and satellite television. Only Ayten
Amin conducts some demanding interviews, with a number of policemen, one of whom
she recruited from her own circle of acquaintances, to scrutinise his professional ethics.
This penchant for the personal — attempts by filmmakers to introduce themselves as
subjective and thus partisan witnesses within the narrative — is found in an array of works,
such as Ahmad Rashwan’s Born on the 25th of January, a painstaking chronicle
of the first phase of the revolt and Forbidden (2011) by Amal Ramsis, shot prior to the
revolt. Ramsis, a political activist, shaped her film essay through a strongly associative
approach, by using conversations with friends and acquaintances, enriched by general
observations from her social environment, to pursue questions regarding the numerous
taboos — political, social, and cultural — that she and others had grown up with.
The filmmaker as investigative subject, who also appears on-screen, is a method by
which to embed subjectivity in documentation. El-Gort (2013) by Tunisian Hamza Ouni
is such an example. For years, the filmmaker had followed his childhood friends from
the deprived city Mohammedia on their exhausting journeys as seasonal hay labourers.
When he involves them in debates, he succeeds in extracting their anguish and despair
but also their “moral corruption”, which they admit with relentless sincerity. In fact, Hamza
Ouni, a self-taught filmmaker, may be considered what Antonio Gramsci defined as an
organic intellectual; one who expresses the interests of their own underprivileged class,
as opposed to traditional intellectuals who, due to their assimilation, help preserve the
existing system’s cultural hegemony. For Julia Kristeva, on the other hand, the intellectual
dissident is an exilic figure who like the organic intellectual dedicates themself to a spe-
cific underprivileged group, such as women, homosexuals, or ethnic minorities.
In her two post-revolution films, Tunisian Nadia El-Fani takes such an overt position of
exilic and minoritarian dissidence. In Laicité Inchallah (2011) she roams the streets
during Ramadan, interviewing and observing people. She scrutinises Islamic ideology
and the double moral standard held by many of her compatriots from her own, secular,
perspective, keeping an eye on the ideal of separation of religion and state. Similar
to Dégage!, this film — which was originally supposed to be called “Neither Allah nor
Master” — clearly illustrates the hardening front between the secular and Islamic camps.
El-Fani subsequently found herself exposed to media attacks, which she documented in
her next film, Même pas mal (No Harm Done, 2012), which uses first-person narration
even more radically, to dwell upon the health problems she had to deal with in parallel
to the public scapegoating she was exposed to.
Family stories
First-person narratives had already begun to appear by the turn of the Millenium, in com-
bination with auto-biographically tainted accounts, such as Salata baladi (An Egyptian
Salad, 2008) by Nadia Kamel, concerning a half-Jewish, half-Italian Christian mother and a
64
Muslim Egyptian-Turkish father. Prompted by the realisation that her little nephew Nabil,
the son of a Palestinian, has to reckon with all these diverse and contradictory identities,
the filmmaker urges her mother to share their complicated family history with him. They
end up travelling to Israel, to visit members of her family whom she has not seen for
several decades, a move that subjected the film to much controversy.
Another, less taboo-breaking but still critical, film is Safaa Fathy’s Mohammad Saved
From the Waters (2012), in which she chronicles her brother’s illness and eventual
passing away from kidney failure, one of Egypt’s most common diseases. The haunting
decease of a family member is also pivotal to Homeland Iraq Year Zero (2015) by
Abbas Fahdel who assembled the footage he had shot back then, of his nephew who was
twelve years old at the time of the American invasion of Iraq, and who eventually fell prey
to the violence that ensued.
Ashlaa (Fragments, 2009), by Moroccan Hakim Belabbes, may be described as an
autobiographical essay, comprising a variety of scenes and images collected over a decade.
Private family recordings, personal reflections on life and death, disappointments and
successes, ageing and exile mount up to depict the filmmaker’s congested relationship
with his father, whereupon the family chronicle turns into the critical chronicle of a coun-
try, of a society. Palestinian Raed Andoni goes a step further with Fix Me (2009). In order
to contextualise his own psychological and physical malaise, socially and politically, he
documented the illuminating course of his own psycho-therapy.
Not all filmmakers use their families or personal familial environment to recollect the
past. In The Roof (2006), Kamal Aljafari dwells on the architecture of his home town, Jaf-
fa, which has been branded by Israel’s colonising project, through minimalist observation
of his family and their daily routine he transports a strong sense of alienation. Another
take on mixing auto-biographical material with stories of greater social and political
scope are poetic journeys as undertaken by Jumana Manna in A Magical Substance
Flows Into Me (2015), to unearth Israel-Palestine’s diverse musical traditions. Or Mais
Darwazah, who travels through time and space, through a bygone love story, and through
Israel-Palestine in My Love Awaits Me by the Sea (2013). Just like in I Am She who
Brings the Flowers to her Grave (2006) by Hala al-Abdallah and Ammar El-Beik, it
is the beautiful associative imagery, the seemingly random human encounters from past
and present, and the subjective narration which link the material of these two last films,
as poetic and subjective audio-visual works.
Subjectivity: What for?
Without a doubt, many recent Arab documentaries have been imbued with overt sub-
jectivity. This applies, as we saw, even to plainly political films which have either been
concerned with buried memory, the course of the uprising or its less immediate circum-
stances. As Alisa Lebow asserts in her “meta documentary” or audio-visual “hypertext”,
Filming Revolution, around one third of the documentaries conceived or completed in
Egypt after the revolution were participatory first-person accounts (www.filmingrevolution.
org/article/108/first_personpersonal_film).
65
 One of her prime examples is Waves (2014) by Ahmed Nour, who mixes the history of
his home town Suez, his own childhood memories and family history, visualised through
animated images, with the peculiar role this city played in the Egyptian uprising. Of course,
this tendency opens up crucial questions as to the reasons why. To answer this with re-
gard to the international arthouse and festival circuit, which is, unlike the local market,
quite receptive to this type of cinema, would be too simplistic. Particularly because many
filmmakers, Ahmed Nour among them, are keen to bring their films to local audiences
even though it is a very difficult enterprise. So far, only films inspired by television aes-
thetics, like Jews of Egypt (2013) by Amir Ramses, have been able to get a release in a
commercial Egyptian movie-theatre.
It could be also a mistake to consider subjectivity and first-person narration, in the
Egyptian context, a sign of neo-liberal individualism and commerciality, as Lebow reca-
pitulates in her analysis of recent Egyptian documentaries: “In a more cynical vein, one
might ask, as I did, whether it couldn’t also be a sign of the neo-liberal demands and
dreams of the revolution, neo-liberalism revering the individual more as a consumer than
a revolutionary no doubt, and preparing the ground for individualistic ideas and pursuits.
But judging from the films themselves, there’s little fear that it is, in fact, individualism
that is being privileged. For the most part, I detected a collectivist inclination in the dec-
impossible to detach the Arab documentary from international development. This is not
to object to Lebow’s view that local specificities do play a role in adjusting the type of
subjectivity that is favoured. My suggestion is to consider Amos Vogler’s interpretation
of Herbert Marcuse’s theory of the role of culture in capitalist societies, which argues
that the capitalist system has been able to buy out political resistance by transforming
dissident arts into a commodity, creating a safety valve of illusionary personal freedom
and installing the idea of the state as a safeguard of order while up-keeping extreme
social differences (Amos Vogler, 1997: 320). We have to admit that in the Arab countries,
the political and economic order has not succeeded in providing the illusion of personal
freedom, despite, or perhaps due to, its untamed neo-liberal orientation. In other words,
unlike in the capitalist heartlands, the citizen here is facing (corpo-)real suppression – of
sometimes life-threatening dimensions — to such an extent, that attempts to appropriate
and commercialise their dissident means of expression have not been entirely efficient;
a fact that may have initiated and safeguarded a great deal of the dissident subjectivity
described above.
1. Chanan, Michael (2007) The Politics of Documentary. Palmgrave Macmillan: London
2. Lebow, Alisa (2015) A Meta Documentary About Filmmaking in Egypt Since The Revolution. www.filmingrevolution.org/

laration of the first person perspective, speaking not in the singular ‘I’, so much as the 3. Marks, Laura (2015) Hanan al-Cinema. London: MIT Press
4. Shafik, Viola (2016) Arab Cinema. History and Cultural Identity. Cairo: AUC Press
plural ‘we’ ” (Lebow, ibd.).
5. Steyerl, Hito (2008) Die Farbe der Wahrheit. Dokumentarismen im Kunstfeld. Turia + Kandt: Wien-Berlin
The socio-economic aspect of subjectivity to which Lebow is referring has, of course, 6. Vogler, Amos (1997) Film als subversive Kunst. Andrä-Wördern: Hannibal Verlag
been discussed at length by scholars concerned with the development of documentary
in the Northern hemisphere and in Latin America. As film historians have shown, it seems
that the first half of the 20th century had already seen the emergence of rhetorical, ar-
gument-based, largely state-produced documentaries by the time more subjective forms
came to the fore. This “major shift [occurred] over the last decades of the twentieth cen-
tury in political culture – and cultural politics – across the globe, but differently manifest
in different parts of it. What unfolded in the heartland of capitalism was a passage from
the politics of class to the identity politics and social movements which followed the
feminist turn of the 70s, in which the conventional boundaries of social identity were
dissolved and subjective selfhood was asserted in forms which challenged old certainties”
(Chanan, 2007: 242).
Yet, not only turn to the personal as being political (Chanan, 2007: 246, Steyerl, 2008:
156) has generally affected the outlook of documentaries on the international market. The
privatisation of the media in the electronic and digital age has commercialised the cul-
tural pedagogic task, which Steyerl calls the disciplinary “paternalist didactic role model
functions” (Leitbildfunktionen; ), previously assigned to documentary in European coun-
tries like Germany and the UK, now pushed towards docutainment and affective impact.
Meanwhile, the format floats between satellite television, the internet and the arthouse
circuit, in a sort of, “not yet existing transnational public sphere” (Steyerl, 2008: 156-7).
The question remains, whether these explanations are also viable for the Arab World.
Yes and no! Due to the transnational nature of production and distribution systems, it is

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