Just last Saturday, CNN.com reported that two Saudi male authors were arrested for seeking a female writer's autograph at a book fair in Riyadh. The novelists ultimately weren't charged with any crime and are now demanding an apology from the Muslim kingdom's Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (hello, George Orwell). This religious police force monitors, among other things, enforcement of dress codes, mandatory observance of prayer times and segregation of the sexes. Saudi Arabia follows a strict interpretation of Islam called Wahhabism and punishes unrelated men and women who are caught "mingling" in public.
And so just as much as we read the disgusting statistics of the abuse of women perpetrated by men (the majority of whom are their husbands, fathers, brothers) not only in these kinds of societies, but all over the world, including the "enlightened" West, both sexes suffer from this lack of freedom, these strictured ways of how we fulfill our roles and interact with one another. Saudi Arabian writer Badreyeh al Bashir eloquently wrote, "I used to think that men are freer than we women, but I realized that men are just as dazed and confused, but in another sphere. I held conversations with my male cousins. I found out that they only enjoy the freedom of place, but their lives are obscene without the partnership of sisters, wives, mothers, [female] colleagues or [female] acquaintances. We are both captured in a world of a single gender, with only one difference: women get the houses, while men get the cold streets and restaurants. What can this isolation and solitude lead up to regardless of the difference?" (Film still above from Eva Mulvad's prize-winning, critically-acclaimed, Enemies of Happiness, 2006.)
At the DOX BOX festival, women's voices, women's presences, women's points of view were quite prominent. The seven films shown in the sidebar program called Women's Voices included beautiful and cinematically stunning pieces of work from all over the world, all helmed by women except for French-Moroccan, Brahim Fritah's The Woman Alone (2004), an example that not all women's stories need be told by females. In his luminous film, we hear Akosse Legba narrate her story of enslavement in France as Fritah films the luxurious Parisian apartment where she works. It's a beautiful and chilling piece.
Today, more than ever before, Arab artists, fillmmakers and writers, both male and female, struggle greatly to search for an identity, figuring out ways and means to tell riveting and bold--and very risky--stories. As in Haifaa Al-Mansour's case, when she shot her film in Saudi Arabia, she was forced to use a very small camera, pretend her subject matter was something other than what it was, and have the presence of her husband or another male accompanying her during her interviews with her female subjects. She is struggling greatly right now to launch a fiction project that she wants to shoot part of in Saudi, even though the project has received a lot of international exposure in places like Rotterdam, Berlin and Dubai. Many Arab filmmakers create their cinema outside of their own countries because of so many restrictions, but as Syrian filmmaker, Meyar Al Roumi, director of Six Ordinary Stories, who works in both Syria and France, says, "I only find myself in the arms of Damascus; my relation with France is strictly professional."
March 8, the 5th day of the festival, was International Women's Day and DOX BOX celebrated with a seminar moderated by Rasha Salti about documentary cinema and female directors. (A subject very close to my heart and the main reason I started this blog.) Festival director, Diana El-Jeiroudi who programmed the sidebar (and is a filmmaker herself) said that the idea of allocating a good portion of the fest to women was not "a feminist activity," so much as a tool to establish a base for women filmmakers in the Arab world. While many women's organizations focus on rights and honor crimes and other societal issues, El-Jeiroudi wanted to specifically focus on women's presence in film and art. "Just as we're working very hard here to ensure that cinema won't disappear, we are working equally as hard to make sure that the disappearance of women's voices and talents in cinema shouldn't be allowed." In talking about the Gender and Cinema Journalism Workshop, Salti thinks it's vital not only to create a space for women's issues in the festival, but to also hear and read the female perspective in film criticism and cultural analysis. (Film still above from Turkish filmmaker Pelin Esmer's The Play, 2005.)
Published in both English and Arabic, the daily bulletin, "Point of View," was the physical manifestation of the workshop's curriculum, led by Ulla Jacobsen, Chief Editor of DOX Magazine (based in Copenhagen) and Nanna Frank Rasmussen, a Danish film critic. They were also joined by KVINFO representative, Louise Voller. The European women worked with female journalists from Morocco, Syria and Jordan, their practicum that of covering the festival and special events, conducting artist interviews and doing daily film reviews. I often saw them huddled over a laptop in the lobby of the festival hotel working away to create a throughline of themes and important topics, from their particular point of view. From what I could gather from the participants I spoke with, it was a very rich and rewarding experience.
I leave you, for now, with some statements from the great Latifa al-Zayyat, an Egyptian critic, writer and intellectual activist who lived from 1923 to 1996: "When I start writing, I omit the censor, keep it away from my creative action, as if I am someone else. That is why I cannot escape the sense of fear when I read what I write. I keep telling myself when I write, that freedom and lying are opposites and they cannot be combined. That is why I try to free the world by capturing its reality no matter how obnoxious and irritating.
" . . . Freedom is a collective war against lying and deception and against the mechanical distractions of rotten slogans. Freedom is a human revolution against institutional, fabricated revolutions that treat creativity as a form of re-writing, while I climb that ladder that leads to the upper spacious heavens where no father, husband or any of those bound by authority lies nor where daily pretentiousness can reach me."
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