This paper argues that since the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states do not offer any means of official political participation—neither to their citizens, nor to their foreign migrant populations—other forms of informal political spheres are being created, especially within the arts. Budding GCC film and art industries are beginning to perform the role of civil society, where sociopolitical issues are being broached in creative ways. Even though these cultural productions are largely constrained by the overarching systems under which they operate, they nonetheless open up new channels for social commentary—sometimes subtle, but at other times more direct. In this paper, I examine some of the locally produced films and artworks that bear overt or covert political statements about everyday life in the Gulf states, from commenting on the predicament of domestic workers to making observations about the Gulf’s increasingly fractured political climate.

In his film A Thousand Months (2003), Moroccan filmmaker Faouzi Bensaidi highlights corrupt Moroccan institutions during the so-called Years of Lead, a period lasting from the 1960s through the 1980s that was marked by state violence. Bensaidi’s recent film Volubilis (2018) revisits the same theme in the post-Arab Spring era, while also highlighting issues of social class and the conflicting ideologies of Islam and globalization. Volubilis exposes the hegemonic gaze of the elite as a political mechanism of power and violence that terrorizes the working class. It highlights the interplay of trauma and socioeconomic oppression by featuring a newlywed Moroccan couple, and describes how the oppressive dynamics of the corrupt system lead to the breakdown of their relationship. Abdelkader is a security guard who is asked by the mall officials to prevent low-class visitors from using the escalator. My paper examines how the mall functions as a form of social closure, where low-class visitors are vetted and excluded from public space. For Pierre Bourdieu, the analysis of public space centers on class, since divisions within classes can be reflected in public spaces. The class habitus produces a division that affects participation in consumption practices. While the mall escalator acts as a means of social exclusivity for the dominant classes and operates as a means of control of the working classes, it also allows some potential of mobility. The paper also argues that Volubilis is a trauma film in which the stronger take their revenge on the poor. Abdelkader is kidnapped and subjected to torture for mistakenly preventing the wife of an elite official from accessing the escalator. His torture and trauma act as vehicles for awakening nostalgia for the past as an escape from the present. The protagonist’s trauma emerges in nostalgic encounters, as he wanders the ruins of Volubilis, an ancient Roman city outside the Moroccan city of Meknes. Cathy Caruth argues that trauma is “not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature returns to haunt the survivor.” While my paper engages with Caruth’s trauma theory and Bourdieu’s class theory, it also critiques their Eurocentric dimensions, as it offers a new understanding of class dynamics in Morocco in the post-Arab Spring era.

In 2012, a UN report asked: “Gaza in 2020, A Liveable Place?” It established that 90% of the water was unfit for drinking and expected the aquifer to be unusable by 2016, while water’s contamination by salinization and sewage would prove irreversible by 2020 (UNCT 2012, 3). While food aid dependency, unemployment, as well as the lack of access to basic services and medical supplies all point to a humanitarian crisis, there seems to be little place left for such “frivolous” concerns as cinema. Yet, maybe surprisingly, Gaza has been home to several film festivals since the mid-2000s. This presentation argues that Gazan film festivals inhabit the humanitarian present by carving out a metaphorical and material “humanitarian space.” It examines how multi-directional efforts, including by Palestinian film practitioners themselves, utilize the construction of emergency, humanitarian management, and economies of aid to revive a film culture in Gaza. Here I discuss the independent film festivals organized by the Palestinian film community, with a focus on the Red Carpet Karama Human Rights Film Festivals first established in the rubbles of the 2014 war. I use the image of the humanitarian space as a tool to explain how cinema endeavors inscribe themselves within the logics of humanitarian economies that are predominant in Gaza. I describe the Red Carpet festival as a humanitarian space because of the kind of necessary community relief it provides. More importantly, these festivals emerge from the negotiations between human rights organizations, government interests, aid recipients, as well as the professional and amateur film community in Gaza. The presentation examines the mission and history of the Red Carpet Festival, interviews of the organizers, the pre-constituted network of human rights film festivals in which the festival partakes, its promotional strategies, and the programming as it travels across human rights film festivals in the region. Here I establish that the Red Carpet involves mobilizing strategies that cross over activist and humanitarian practices, such as the modularization of organizational tools. The presentation thus opens up humanitarian politics of bare life towards a politics of “more life” (Honig 2014) that gives space and necessity to “non-necessary” leisure like cinema.

This paper interrogates the local popularity and international success of Ziad Doueiry’s film The Insult within the context of contested memory politics and ensuing controversy that continues to surround his work. His film, which depicts a courtroom feud between a Palestinian and a Christian that has them recalling old civil war wounds, comes two decades after the Lebanese civil war and belongs to a larger body of Lebanese war cinema that emerges within a framework of state-sponsored amnesia. While the film’s success was in many ways unprecedented, it has also been met with backlash particularly from the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement that accused Doueiry of promoting a Zionist agenda. In this paper, I explore the film’s treatment of memory politics and the claims it makes about mnemonic hegemonies to understand its reception among these different local and transnational publics. I begin by situating the film within its larger media context to interrogate the technologies of recognition that structure its circulation, reception, and ultimate success. I show how the circumstances surrounding the writing of the script and the release of the film largely determined how the polemic messages of the film were framed and absorbed. This discussion is simultaneously framed by scholarship that assesses the circulation of films from the Global South in international film festivals and markets (Lazaro-Robel, Falicov, Shih, Frederic). By comparing a number of contexts of reception, namely local and international film reviews, I not only show how the circulation of the film limited the discursive parameters surrounding the issue of the civil war, but I also elucidate the dialectical relationship and dynamics that exist between transnational and local contexts of reception.

Arab filmmakers and critics coined the term “alternative cinema” (al-sinima al-badilah) at a symposium held during the First International Young Filmmakers Festival in 1972. Alternative cinema would encompass regional film movements and projects that challenged the hegemony of commercial cinema, supported new forms of cinematic engagement, served progressive political movements, and encouraged experimentation and personal expression. Participants at the gathering believed that a regional Arab film movement could provide space for personal and political expression that national contexts did not permit, and that a robust Arab cinema would serve as a bridge towards a global third world cinema movement. Alternative cinema would be radical and inclusive, and would continually strive to define its own parameters and articulate a utopian vision for what cinema should be and do. By examining the films of early alternative Arab cinema for how they represent the Arab city, one can trace conceptual and aesthetic trends shared by filmmakers across the region. “City” films also lend themselves to considerations of history, modernization, postcolonialism that are shared across the region in particularly useful ways. While the films analyzed in this paper are very much focused on specific social, political, and environmental concerns, the cities that are represented within them share a history that shapes these filmmaker’s works. A focus on that aspect of their work adds depth to our understanding of the films themselves and may even reshape our understanding of Arab cinema of the 1970s. Specifically, in this paper I examine films Retour a Agadir by Mohamed Afifi (about Agadir), Omar Gatlato by Merzka Allouche (about Algiers), and Beirut the Encounter by Borhane Alaouie (about Beirut). In each of these works filmmakers deploy film structure, a complex sound track, and the movement of figures through space to illuminate particular aspects of how space is dialectically produced through the interplay of perception, conception, and the rhythms of lived experience (LeFebve),