Pushing the Boundaries of Documentary in Post-Nationalist Palestinian Filmaking In O Persecuted (2014) video artist Basma Alsharif offers a contemporary response to Our Small Houses, the film Qasim Hawal made in 1974 made for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Alsharif distorts and covers up the image and sound of the original film, allowing just parts and flashes of Hawal’s images and text to emerge from a covering of black paint and distorted sound. The work emphasizes the distance separating the idealistic, Marxist-Leninist imaginings for the future of Palestine as a workers’ utopia that is expressed in this 1970s proto-film essay from the objectification of women’s bodies that underlies a hedonistic spring break culture on Tel Aviv’s beaches of the 2010s. It also comments on the process of film restoration as one of imperfect and incomplete translation, thereby confirming the eternal pastness of the past. Alsharif’s work has been described as “Post-Palestinian” in that it questions the nationalist frame of a Palestinian politics without compromising on Palestinian political claims. It also might be termed post-documentary in the way that foregrounds the mutability of a documentary work, how its meaning changes when viewed in different historical circumstances. This paper analyzes recent works by Alsharif and Kamal Aljafari, another filmmaker who pushes the boundaries of documentary filmmaking (in his case, by manipulating old Israel and American films to uncover a Palestinian presence that was consciously erased) in ways that engage critically with historical distance and nationalist frameworks. Both artists engage with the traces of the real in film footage to creatively address the current Palestinian condition.

Derived from the French term _documentaire_, documentary filmmaking has historically privileged visual elements over acoustic ones. During the early twentieth century, documentaries were held to present “serious travelogue,” rather than scenic views, a distinction particularly important in consideration of the orientalist treatment of the Arab World. Perhaps nowhere remained as underrepresented as the Arabian Peninsula. An early documentary on the Trucial States, NET Journal’s _Farewell Arabia_ (1967) uses expository voiceover to explain scenic views of Bedouin traditions, allegedly vanishing beneath the sounds of automobiles, jet engines, oil wells, and foreign advisers. This paper examines two recent documentaries, produced and set in the United Arab Emirates, that layer visual images with the sounds of South Asia. Lebanese filmmaker Mahmoud Kaaboor’s _Champ of the Camp_ (2013) examines the lives of South Asian expatriates who work in construction and maintenance around Dubai. Organized by middle-class South Asian women, the “Camp ka Champ” talent-show makes audible the role of popular Hindi and contemporary Bollywood song in the transnational configuration of Dubai. Contestants communicate in various South Asian languages. Comparably, Emirati filmmaker Nujoom Alghanem’s _Sounds of the Sea_ (2014) recovers a rapidly disappearing earlier moment in the connections between the Arab Gulf and South Asia in the sea songs that sailors performed as they navigate their boats from port to port. The folklore society of the northern emirate learns that they must import singers from India to perform the Arabic-language songs for the heritage festival since no Emiratis remember them. The two films, along with others by South Asian filmmakers, notably CAMP’s _From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf_ (2009–2013), engage an ongoing interconnection between the Arab Gulf and South Asia through its acoustic devices, thus offering a way to conceive documentary practice, not only in terms of complex relationships between sounds and images, but also in terms of interconnected regional and ethnic contexts. The films convey the role of acoustic images in communicating a sense of the transcultural dimensions of life in the Arab Gulf that might reorient investigations in Arab documentary away from preoccupations with the West and towards the Indian Ocean, that is, away from the civil wars and political corruptions that followed colonialism and imperialism towards other anchoring points that can transform self and rebuilt subjectivity in a part of the world largely ignored in documentary studies.

The Zayed University Middle East Film Festival (ZUMEFF), now in its eighth year, has showcased Arab student filmmakers from 17 Middle East countries and more than 50 universities. Based on the research done by and for ZUMEFF, this panel looks at where students are making documentaries, what they are making them about, and how they are being mentored in educational institutions. Using an analysis of the ZUMEFF catalogue and interviews with student filmmakers and educators, this presentation asks the bigger question: Is there proper documentary film education in the Middle East, and in this troubled, multicultural and financially strained region, who has access to it?

This paper examines the critical social portraiture of Abounaddara, the anonymous Syrian video collective that emerged in 2011 with the onset of the uprising in Syria, framing their work as a practice of radical historiography that complicates traditional notions of mapping and humanitarian media produced under the conditions of “regime made disaster.” In recent years, a small chorus of scholars have argued that viewing images of humanitarian crisis is an essential civic skill that must be developed, one whose practices make possible the reconstruction of an imagined community of the governed through the circulation of images. In this frame, the civil discourse that is catalyzed by the production of and engagement with images of humanitarian disaster has the capacity to suspend governmental representation, the nationalist dynamics that enable it, and the identification of disaster with the populations upon whom it is afflicted. My paper examines the efforts of Abounaddara to construct such a digital interface, one where disparate cultures, both inside and outside of Syria, confront one another in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination and one that links the intervals of mass-mediated, digital, and immaterial media flows with the localized and materialized conditions of a war in process. Across their vast output, the collective employs radical techniques to uncouple the locational and divisional domains of conventional cartography and documentary from their acts of social portraiture. Their works, I argue, negate the documentary functions of authorship, metonymy, index, scale, and representation in order to fracture unified productions of Syrian locality. Avoiding cohesive representations, the collective focuses on the visual bonds facilitated by the speed at which digital interfaces allow images to circulate. At stake for the collective is the re-conception of the politics of the image, one that clears a way for a domain of political relations structured by a shared media interface rather than sovereign claims. Partial Bibliography: Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography. New York: Verso Books, 2012. Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. Jai Sen, “Other Worlds, Other Maps: Mapping the Unintended City,” in An Atlas of Radical Cartography, ed. Like Mogel and Alexis Bhagat. New York: D.A.P. /Distributed Art, 2008. Jalal Toufic. The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster. Forthcoming Books, 2009.