Arabs and Kurds in Iran live not only on the margins of national narrative but also at a geographical border that keeps their Iranian identities in and other discordant considerations out. During the Iran-Iraq war, their liminal status came to the fore, and the hyphen connecting Kurdish-Iranian and Arab-Iranian became a vexed bridge requiring refortification. With the added tension over the Kurdish struggle for independence and Saddam Husayn’s pan-Arabism campaign, the indeterminate identity of these ethnic minorities in Iran needed to be re-articulated in terms of Islamic filiations and against ethnicity-based ideologies. For the Islamic Republic, the Persian nationalist rhetoric of the Pahlavi dynasty was no longer a unifying narrative. In my presentation, I will look closely at two popular Iranian war films that expose the interpellation of Iranian Arabs and Kurds, who have to recognize themselves as subjects of a re-articulated Iranian ideology. Ashke Sarma (2005) directed by war veteran Azizollah Hamidnezhad, and Ruz-e Sevom (2007), directed by Mohammad Hossein Latifi and winner of the best film at the Iranian Fajr Film Festival, present the Arab and Kurdish ties to Iranians in tragic tales of forbidden love. In Ruz-e Sevom, Fouad, an Iraqi-Arab teacher in Iran turned an officer in Iraqi army, is a suitor for the Iranian Samina, whom he hopes to possess with the same violent conviction he wants to take back the Iranian province of Khuzestan. Iraqi Arabs are portrayed as either good (Muslim brothers who were conscripted against their will) or bad (evil Ba’ath infidels). Iranians can have no affection for a bad Arab but welcome any good Arab who wants to be a member of their family. In the end, Samina has to kill Fouad to free herself. The more complicated political condition of Kurdish Iranians is highlighted in Ashke Sarma’s doomed love story between Kiyani, an Iranian empathic minesweeper, and Ronak, who is conscripted as a Kurdish rebel. The film suggests Iranian Kurds should join the community of the Islamic Republic because they need each other. Furthermore, while pinning blame on Kurdish separatists, it also emphasizes the problems of mistrust and the lack of amicable relationships between Iranians and Kurds. The army commander punishes Kiyani while also describing all Kurdish natives as potential enemies and the Kurdish terrain as contaminated and different from the Khuzestan province.

Early cinema was initially embraced by the Ottoman upper class and royal family in December 1896 in imperial Istanbul. Strict policies implemented by the Yildiz Palace administration directly determined the availability and spread of cinema until the dethronement of Sultan Abdulhamid II after the Young Turk Revolution (1908). This paper will address significant codified regulations of early cinema during the Hamidian era. It aims to focus on the role of Hamidian cinema policies, mostly practiced by police forces and other local authorities. The mystification of Sultan Abdulhamid II’s actions by some scholars leads to a problematic discourse and ill-defined historical characterization in the current cinema scholarship in Turkey and wider international scene. Thus, specific interest will be given to these certain discourses constructed by the scholars within the regulations of early cinema (i.e., discourses on the use of electricity for film screenings, censorship). For this purpose, I will try to refute the “prohibition model” created by the scholars and will show the “productive” face of the Hamidian era in the whole arrays of cinema regulations. Archival sources in the form of governmental decrees and legal acts, as well as press reviews play an important role for this paper’s interdisciplinary approach in which historical and film studies’ methodologies are utilized. Exploring the key issues on regulation of cinema during the Hamidian era will contribute to the non-Western societies’ histories and practices of early cinema within the distinct milieu of the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the twentieth century.

Férid Boughedir’s first feature-length film, "Halfaouine," the most successful film ever made in Tunisia, tells the story of a twelve-year-old boy, Noura, who lives in Halfaouine, a working-class neighborhood in the old city of Tunis. Ostensibly about the awakening of desire and Noura’s transition to heterosexual maturity, it offers an amused and affectionate portrait of Tunisian society, while at the same time lamenting the encroaching police state. The film’s phenomenal success at the box-office can be attributed in part to its lightness of tone and comedic aspects, which play on Noura’s youth and inexperience, as he seeks on the one hand to be taken seriously as a young adult, and tries on the other to hang onto the liberties he still enjoys as a boy, one who can move with relative freedom in both the public sphere dominated by men and the private sphere dominated by women. Critics tend to follow the director’s suggestion that "Halfaouine" is a tale “seen through the eyes of a child trying to find his way in an adult universe, within a conservative society where strict separation of the sexes rules.” And it is easy to agree with Boughedir when he insists that he wants to show in his film “a Mediterranean society, exuberant and affectionate, where humor and eroticism always have their place, along with tolerance,” adding: “I believe in the liberatory virtues of laughter and of eroticism—I believe, like the writer Georges Bataille, that ‘eroticism is the approbation of life even unto death.’” But critics tend also to avoid almost completely any discussion of the film’s darkly pessimistic parallel-narrative about patriarchal oppression and the brutality of the police state. The film makes it abundantly clear that the father’s heavy-handed authoritarianism should not to be taken merely as an unlucky element of Noura’s biography, but should be seen as emblematic of an authoritarianism that permeates Tunisian society and finds its ultimate embodiment in the President of the Republic himself. In allegorical mode, the film describes the steady erosion and loss in Tunisia of the individual’s liberties and freedoms, as the state reaches deeply into the private sphere and causes unhappiness and dysfunction everywhere.

The challenge Mizrahi cinema has posed to the regnant Ashkenazi-Zionist narrative transpires in a growing number of films which unearth a story about Jewish life in Arab lands or events based on early encounters between the Mizrahi immigrants and the absorbing society in Palestine/Israel. This presentation focuses on The Ringworm Children (David Belhassen and Asher Hemias, 2003), Unpromised Land (Ayelet Heller, 1992), The Pioneers (Sigalit Banai, 2008), and The Farhud (Yitzhak Halutzi, 2008). Taken together, these films contrive to impart a story of life in the Diaspora or in the Land of Israel that, if not quite equal to, then at least is reminiscent of the Ashkenazi tale of suffering in exile and redemption in the Promised Land, namely, that Mizrahi Jews too participated and contributed to the Zionist enterprise. These documentaries and docudramas are designed to create a more inclusive Zionist narrative and ask that this parity is finally acknowledged. This paper adopts postcolonial conceptualizations of the ethnic divisions in Israel as formulated in the works of Ella Shohat, Yehuda Shenhav, and other post- and anti-Zionist scholars. Specifically, “Corrective Histories: The Ashkenazi Benchmark of Mizrahi Memory in Cinema” argues that the films it discusses opt for a derivative discourse whereby they “re-write” history instead of “write it back” (Bill Ashcroft). To wit, I deem it significant that the manner in which these stories are told amounts to a concerted effort to narrate the Mizrahi story within the parameters of the Ashkenazi-Zionist master narrative. These works subordinate the former to the latter to facilitate the acceptance of the Mizrahi past into the pantheon of the Zionist sanctified myths about the trauma of exilic life, the immigrants’ pioneering spirit, and the settling of the land. By doing so, these films fail to broach the possibility of wresting a Mizrahi narrative away from the Zionist procrustean memory. Ashcroft, Bill. 2001. Post-Colonial Transformation. London and New York: Routledge. Shenhav, Yehuda. 2006. The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Shohat, Ella. 1989/2010. Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation. Austin: University of Texas Press/London and New York: I.B. Tauris. ________. 1988. “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims.” Social Text, 19–20, pp. 1–35. ________. 2001. “Rapture and Return: The Shaping of a Mizrahi Epistemology.” In HAGAR: International Social Science Review. 2: 1, pp. 61–92.

Recent international scholarly interest in Turkish contributions to artistic ecocriticism – with its focus on the re-analysis of literary works by Ya?ar Kemal, Yaman Koray, Abbas Sayar, the Garip Movement poets and the (often anonymous) composers of Anatolian mystic poetry and folk songs – is encouraging and yet sometimes lacking in feminist perspective, regional specificity and/or historical relevance. Furthermore, Turkish filmmakers’ engagement with 20th and 21st century environmental issues, in particular with those that affect the livelihood and daily socio-cultural experience of Turkish women, has rarely been discussed. In an attempt to shift the ecocritical dialog on Turkey to the discipline of film studies and call the “male gaze” bias into question, this paper will explore the portrayal of both Taurus and Black Sea mountain village women’s relationship to their changing natural and socio-cultural environment in four documentary, semi-documentary and fictional films produced in Turkey in the last seven years. My comparative analysis of Pelin Esmer’s The Play (2006), Suha Ar?n’s Fatma of the Forest (2010), Ye?im Ustao?lu’s Waiting for the Clouds (2009) and Yusuf Kurçenli’s Ask Your Heart (2010) will focus first on the validity (or conversely, the fictionality) of these films’ images and messages about mountain village women’s daily work (and play) in their immediate natural environment, and compare them briefly to common images of and “truisms” about Anatolian village women developed in 20th century Turkish popular, nationalistic and academic discourses. Then I will explore the films’ portrayal of how political and/or economic changes in the nation (or empire) at large alter that particular region’s physical and social environment and its role in the women’s knowledge of the world as well as in their negotiation of gender roles. Finally, in order to contextualize these particular films’ production and reception, I will touch upon the broader implications of producing and/or consuming static (vs. dynamic) cinematic images of local environments and cultures, be it for the purpose of entertainment and/or education, or for the promotion of cultural tourism and/or social change. Keywords: ecocriticism, film studies, Turkish village women