In his essay “New Realism in Arab Cinema,” Tunisian filmmaker Nouri Bouzid contends that the Arab defeat in the June 1967 war with Israel shattered the illusions of nationalistic slogans and military regimes, “awaken[ing] the Arabs from their dreaming” (242). Against this “backdrop of failure and disintegration,” Arab filmmakers arose to reshape understandings of realism in the wake of political defeat (242). This presentation traces the evolving perceptions of realism in Arab cinema from the 1960s-80s and the central space that the Palestinian “question” occupies within these debates. Defining events like Algerian Independence catalyzed a wave of militant cinema which countered the conventions of bourgeois Egyptian film productions. This genre of political film, exemplified by works like Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), was defined by its engagement with anti-colonialism and social realism. The aftermath of June 1967 reshaped the political imaginary, compelling Arab filmmakers to experiment with a counter-cinema capable of conveying the realities of this postwar moment. “New Realism” emerges as an aesthetic and political tool to confront the disillusionment of political failure. This presentation examines different experiments with “New Realism,” exploring how Arab filmmakers countered tropes that predominated state-sponsored, anti-colonial cinema. The methodological focus of this presentation relies on the analysis of film manifestos and close visual reading of my case studies. Anglophone scholarship on anti-colonial cinema primarily spotlights Latin America, Europe, and the legacies of May ’68 as the focal points of this era, however, this presentation widens the field’s scope to emphasize Arab perspectives on realism, decolonization, and political cinema. Additionally, it advocates for re-centering Palestine in historical engagements with political cinema and the anti-colonial century, particularly as Palestinian life and sovereignty remains under grave threat.

This paper investigates the importance of the archive as a tool for historicizing war, specifically the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) that has not been transcribed into accessible historical texts to be taught within institutional frameworks. While educational institutes fail to impart such essential knowledge to their pupils, artistic cultural productions such as films engage with such historical events. By analyzing the 1998 film West Beirut directed by Ziad Doueiri in parallel with Walid Raad’s 1999 short The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs, this study explores films as archives that can preserve memories, events and social interactions often lost within traditional archiving processes. In a postwar era of retrospection and social reconstruction – stained by a state-sponsored amnesia of the war – these films recount historical experiences through the employment of fiction and mythology within the subversive space of cinematic narrative-building. This research lies at the juncture between films and archives, the relationship of filmmakers to archives, and the potential pedagogical device of film as a democratic storytelling apparatus. Doueiri’s iconic film can be analyzed as a site of cultural production creating a shift in collective consciousness about the war, or perhaps awakening a more nuanced relationship between the Lebanese populace and postwar material politics. Raad’s film, a fabulation, derives its ‘truthfulness’ from the culmination of imagined events of the war. I argue that the use of storytelling through a filmmaker’s lens is an act of archival recollection and revolt that challenge a repressed history long dominating the Lebanese sociopolitical landscape. Film’s relationship to reality, as well as the sense perceptions of viewers, generate a productive fixation with the work, revealing the potency embedded in fiction, specifically cinematic imaginaries. Analyzing key visual elements, characters and plotlines in these films can reveal the power of the archive as a tool for negotiating between imagined fictions and the ‘real’, whatever that may be in the collective minds of generations of war survivors and the ripples they generate in the present. The formal, aesthetic, and narrative components of these films contribute to the archiving of history and memory, while the filmmakers’ processes of production challenge the limitations of historicizing war. These films as archives of images and collective memory give form to generational trauma through narratives of war that flit between factualized fiction and falsified fact, which filmmakers Raad and Doueiri employ as a significant tool for reconciling historically incongruent accounts of war.

Much of the scholarly attention to the post-1979 Revolution cinema in Iran disregards pro-regime filmic practices, with Iran-Iraq War films as a nationalist exception, in favor of the oppositional art-house cinema. ‘Ammār “popular” film festival, run by the Research Institute of Islamic Revolution Cultural Front, was born in response to the 2009 Green Movement inside Iran as well as the Islamic Republic’s increased presence in Southwest Asia under its anti-imperialism banner. Through the past fourteen years, ‘Ammār festival has exhibited hundreds of cinematic works, mostly short documentaries, made by pro-regime media producers who find the art-house cinema as “West-pleasing,” the national cinema industry “Westoxificated,” and the state-run television too timid for their revolutionary fervor. ‘Ammār’s distinguishing feature lies in its down-to-earth screenings in mosques, schools, military bases, and the houses of “Holy Shrine Defenders” in the provinces that are followed by political discussions amongst the poor. In recent years, a selection of the festival’s works, emphasizing “Axis-of-Resistance,” has also been screened in several Central and Southwest Asian countries at the Islamic Republic’s cultural embassies, particularly Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and Yemen. While ‘Ammār has been ignored by film critics in Iran due to its formal amateurism and overtly political message, the organizers themselves have published several books and articles in Farsi that theorize and historicize the festival. These texts nationally graft ‘Ammar’s production and exhibition to soldier-filmmakers and free-of-charge screenings for the soldiers during the Iran-Iraq war (1980–88) and in opposition to the bourgeois national cinema. Transnationally, these sources associate ‘Ammar’s militancy with that of the anti-imperial Third Cinema movement in Latin America during the 1960s and 70s and against the secular humanism and formalism of Iranian art-house cinema, aesthetically and politically well-received in Western film festivals. Reading this archive against its grain and through the scholarship on colonial cinema and film festivals, this paper argues that ‘Ammar film festival, alongside its anti-U.S. imperialism, functions as Islamic Republic’s own apparatus where the festival’s down-to-earth modus operandi materially translates into the enactment of temporary colonial spaces outside Iran and the maintenance of Persian-Shia nationalism inside Iran. By attending to such cultural practices, this study first hopes to contribute to the growing scholarship that interrogates the Islamic Republic of Iran’s imperial project in the region, and second to the field of film studies by injecting the colonial cinema’s statecraft, assumed as past, into the contemporaneity of global film festivals.