RADICAL MODERNISMS: RETRACING ARAB AND NORTH AFRICAN FILM HISTORIES is a two-part program curated by Peter Limbrick, Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz and author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi.
This program addresses aesthetic and cultural experiments that emerged in Arab and North African cinema from the 1960s, experiments that showed filmmakers and artists responding to histories of colonialism and the challenges of the present. Drawing on local vernaculars and international influences alike, these filmmakers created radical forms that deserve continued attention and discussion as well as urgent efforts of preservation and recirculation.
Radical Modernisms: Retracing Arab and North African Film Histories (Part 1): A film screening and panel discussion based on Peter Limbrick’s recent book on the films of Moumen Smihi and on Arab and North African cinema within a modernist frame. Smihi’s films are remarkable for the way that they emerge from and reflect on contemporary Moroccan realities within a practice that is also rooted in broader cultural dialogues across the Arab world and with international cinema more generally. Smihi’s first film Si Moh, the Unlucky Man (Si Moh, pas de chance, 1971), was made in Paris shortly after he graduated from IDHEC. An investigation of the life of migrant workers in France, the film established him as an important voice in North African cinema. His later feature A Muslim Childhood (2015), the first in what has become a kind of semi-autobiographical trilogy for Smihi, offers a tapestry of fifties Tangier—an international zone marked by the influence of Arab, Amazigh, European, and American histories. Together with these films, the program includes Mohammad Malas's film Dreams of the City (Ahlam al-Madina) (1984), a film that develops a complex history of Syria in the 1950s in light of the many traumas of the period, all in a mode with which Smihi’s own films are in sustained conversation.
Film screening
Si Moh, the Unlucky Man (Si Moh, pas de chance) Moumen Smihi, France, 1971, 17 min
A Muslim Childhood (El Ayel/Le gosse de Tanger) Moumen Smihi, Morocco, 2005, 83 min
Dreams of the City (Ahlam al-Madina) Mohammad Malas, Syria, 1984, 120 min
Discussion Arab Modernism as World Cinema: Moumen Smihi and Peter Limbrick in conversation with Tarek Elhaik
This program is co-sponsored by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa at UC Santa Cruz
Radical Modernisms: Retracing Arab and North African Film Histories was presented as part of the ArteEast legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, preserving and presenting over 17 years of film and video programming by ArteEast.
Dreams of the City (Ahlam al-Madina)
When his father dies, Dib, his younger brother and their mother (Yasmine Khlat) move away from their hometown Quneitra to Damascus. The mother’s despotic father reluctantly takes them in and tries to force the mother to remarry. Overwhelmed by the magic of the city, Dib wants to discover everything and is full of dreams, but his daily life is shaped by insults and punishments. Dib grows up against a backdrop of the political upheavals of the 1950s (the end of the military dictatorship in Syria and the nationalization of the Suez Canal, Nasser’s taking of power in Cairo, Egyptian and Syrian unification in 1958) and loses his childish illusions in the face of such violence and brutality. The dreams of the city prove to be a nightmare. Mohammad Malas’ partly autobiographical debut film marked the transition to auteur cinema in Syria and signaled the arrival of a generation of Syrian filmmakers whose work offered a subversive challenge to the status quo within an industry rigorously controlled by the state.
About the filmmaker
Mohammad Malas was born in 1945 in the village of Quneitra, Syria (destroyed by Israel’s occupation of the Golan and the subject of Malas’s later film, Quneitra 74). After studying cinema at the Soviet state cinema school, VGIK, in Moscow, he returned to Syria to work in television and made the documentaries Quneitra 74 and The Memory (al-Zhakira, 1977) before writing and directing his first feature, Dreams of the City (Ahlam al-Madina, 1984). In the years that followed he frequently collaborated with other Syrian filmmakers like Omar Amiralay and Oussama Mohammad, and continued to direct documentaries and features including The Dream (al-Manam, 1982), which he shot in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and The Night (al-Layl, 1992), the second part of his semi-autobiographical trilogy, among many others. Malas has published screenplays and diaries and his films have won awards at several international festivals including Carthage, Valencia, and Marrakesh.
- Year1984
- Runtime120 minutes
- LanguageArabic
- CountrySyria
- DirectorMohammad Malas
- ScreenwriterMohammad Malas, Samir Zirka
- Executive ProducerGeorges Bishara
- Co-ProducerNational Film Organization
- CastYasmine Khlat, Rafik Sbeit, Bassel el Abdiadh, Hisham Khcheifati, Talhat Hamdi, Adnan Barakat, Naji Jabr, Adib Chhadeh, Ayman Zeidan, Nazir Sarhan, Raja Kotrach, Hasan Dakkak
- CinematographerUrdijan Engin
- EditorHaitham Kouatly
- Sound DesignHassan Salem, Emil Saadeh
RADICAL MODERNISMS: RETRACING ARAB AND NORTH AFRICAN FILM HISTORIES is a two-part program curated by Peter Limbrick, Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz and author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi.
This program addresses aesthetic and cultural experiments that emerged in Arab and North African cinema from the 1960s, experiments that showed filmmakers and artists responding to histories of colonialism and the challenges of the present. Drawing on local vernaculars and international influences alike, these filmmakers created radical forms that deserve continued attention and discussion as well as urgent efforts of preservation and recirculation.
Radical Modernisms: Retracing Arab and North African Film Histories (Part 1): A film screening and panel discussion based on Peter Limbrick’s recent book on the films of Moumen Smihi and on Arab and North African cinema within a modernist frame. Smihi’s films are remarkable for the way that they emerge from and reflect on contemporary Moroccan realities within a practice that is also rooted in broader cultural dialogues across the Arab world and with international cinema more generally. Smihi’s first film Si Moh, the Unlucky Man (Si Moh, pas de chance, 1971), was made in Paris shortly after he graduated from IDHEC. An investigation of the life of migrant workers in France, the film established him as an important voice in North African cinema. His later feature A Muslim Childhood (2015), the first in what has become a kind of semi-autobiographical trilogy for Smihi, offers a tapestry of fifties Tangier—an international zone marked by the influence of Arab, Amazigh, European, and American histories. Together with these films, the program includes Mohammad Malas's film Dreams of the City (Ahlam al-Madina) (1984), a film that develops a complex history of Syria in the 1950s in light of the many traumas of the period, all in a mode with which Smihi’s own films are in sustained conversation.
Film screening
Si Moh, the Unlucky Man (Si Moh, pas de chance) Moumen Smihi, France, 1971, 17 min
A Muslim Childhood (El Ayel/Le gosse de Tanger) Moumen Smihi, Morocco, 2005, 83 min
Dreams of the City (Ahlam al-Madina) Mohammad Malas, Syria, 1984, 120 min
Discussion Arab Modernism as World Cinema: Moumen Smihi and Peter Limbrick in conversation with Tarek Elhaik
This program is co-sponsored by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa at UC Santa Cruz
Radical Modernisms: Retracing Arab and North African Film Histories was presented as part of the ArteEast legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, preserving and presenting over 17 years of film and video programming by ArteEast.
Dreams of the City (Ahlam al-Madina)
When his father dies, Dib, his younger brother and their mother (Yasmine Khlat) move away from their hometown Quneitra to Damascus. The mother’s despotic father reluctantly takes them in and tries to force the mother to remarry. Overwhelmed by the magic of the city, Dib wants to discover everything and is full of dreams, but his daily life is shaped by insults and punishments. Dib grows up against a backdrop of the political upheavals of the 1950s (the end of the military dictatorship in Syria and the nationalization of the Suez Canal, Nasser’s taking of power in Cairo, Egyptian and Syrian unification in 1958) and loses his childish illusions in the face of such violence and brutality. The dreams of the city prove to be a nightmare. Mohammad Malas’ partly autobiographical debut film marked the transition to auteur cinema in Syria and signaled the arrival of a generation of Syrian filmmakers whose work offered a subversive challenge to the status quo within an industry rigorously controlled by the state.
About the filmmaker
Mohammad Malas was born in 1945 in the village of Quneitra, Syria (destroyed by Israel’s occupation of the Golan and the subject of Malas’s later film, Quneitra 74). After studying cinema at the Soviet state cinema school, VGIK, in Moscow, he returned to Syria to work in television and made the documentaries Quneitra 74 and The Memory (al-Zhakira, 1977) before writing and directing his first feature, Dreams of the City (Ahlam al-Madina, 1984). In the years that followed he frequently collaborated with other Syrian filmmakers like Omar Amiralay and Oussama Mohammad, and continued to direct documentaries and features including The Dream (al-Manam, 1982), which he shot in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and The Night (al-Layl, 1992), the second part of his semi-autobiographical trilogy, among many others. Malas has published screenplays and diaries and his films have won awards at several international festivals including Carthage, Valencia, and Marrakesh.
- Year1984
- Runtime120 minutes
- LanguageArabic
- CountrySyria
- DirectorMohammad Malas
- ScreenwriterMohammad Malas, Samir Zirka
- Executive ProducerGeorges Bishara
- Co-ProducerNational Film Organization
- CastYasmine Khlat, Rafik Sbeit, Bassel el Abdiadh, Hisham Khcheifati, Talhat Hamdi, Adnan Barakat, Naji Jabr, Adib Chhadeh, Ayman Zeidan, Nazir Sarhan, Raja Kotrach, Hasan Dakkak
- CinematographerUrdijan Engin
- EditorHaitham Kouatly
- Sound DesignHassan Salem, Emil Saadeh