﻿RADICAL MODERNISMS: RETRACING ARAB AND NORTH AFRICAN FILM HISTORIES&nbsp;is a two-part program curated by Peter Limbrick, <a href="https://film.ucsc.edu/faculty/peter_limbrick" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">Professor of Film and Digital Media</a> at UC Santa Cruz and author of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/9780520330573" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 102, 204);">Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi</a>. 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. Retracing Arab and North African Film Histories (Part 2):&nbsp;The films included in the package are rare and vital treasures of Moroccan and diasporic Maghrebi filmmaking. We are proud to present the US premiere of the recently restored Ali in Wonderland (1976), a stunning film about Maghrebi migration and life in France that resonates with Moumen Smihi’s earlier film on this topic in Part One of our program. Also included are two rarely-seen films by the Moroccan filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani and his collaborators: the recently restored “city symphony” film Six and Twelve (1968) and the radical archival essay film Memory 14 (1971) which turns to the French colonial archive to create a searing and poetic essay on Moroccan history. The program also includes another recent restoration: the feature film About Some Meaningless Events (1974), directed by Mostafa Derkaoui, which is recirculating decades after it was first banned in Morocco. Together these films offer audiences an exciting exploration of the fragile and often overlooked cinematic legacy of Morocco and the Maghreb. <a href="https://watch.eventive.org/artearchive/play/6155f46402d33600c982495f/6155f76168818900a0a94a1c" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent;">Livestream Panel Discussion: October 24 at 3 pm EDT</a>Cinematic Archives, Preservation, and Circulation in the Maghreb.The screening will be accompanied by a live stream panel discussion addressing the question of archives and the urgent demands of preservation and recirculation of work that is at risk of disappearance. Film Screening: October 21-24: Six and Twelve (Six et Douze), Ahmed Bouanani, Mohammed A. Tazi, Abdelmajid Rechiche, Morocco, 1968, 18 minMemory 14 (Mémoire 14), Ahmed Bouanani, Morocco, 1968, 24 minAbout Some Meaningless Events (De quelques évènements sans signification), Mostafa Derkaoui, Morocco, 1974, 76 min Also included for a limited period of 6 hours on October 23 starting at 12pm EDT:Ali in Wonderland (Ali au pays des merveilles), Djouhra Abouda et Alain Bonnamy, France, 1976, 59 min US PREMIERE ! To access the film Register <a href="https://watch.eventive.org/artearchive/play/615b06d03f7d05003dd3181a" target="_blank" class="ql-size-large" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(230, 0, 0);">HERE</a> 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 is presented as part of the ArteEast legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, preserving and presenting over 17 years of film and video programming by ArteEast.

Six and Twelve (Six et Douze), Ahmed Bouanani Synopsis: Six and Twelve is one of a series of short films and documentaries produced under the auspices of the Centre Cinématographique Marocain in the years after Moroccan independence. While most of these were utilitarian in nature, Bouanani, Tazi, and Rechiche took a different route with this film, creating a modernist “city symphony” film that documented six hours in the life of the city of Casablanca. Combining a hard bebop soundtrack with stunning black and white cinematography and a radical editing style, the film stands as a document to the energetic experimentation of this period of Moroccan art and cinema. <img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/eventive-static/4f4ba79bda3001ef354dd5a60ee74802.jpg" width="161" style="display: inline; float: left; margin: 0px 1em 1em 0px;">Bio: Ahmed Bouanani (1938-2011) was a filmmaker, poet, novelist, and painter. As filmmaker, he worked in many capacities as an editor, writer, and director. His sole feature-length film as director is Mirage (Assarab, 1979) but he directed and edited many more works of short fiction and documentary, including Six and Twelve (Six et Douze, 1968), Memory 14 (Mémoire 14, 1971) and The Four Springs (Les quatres sources, 1977). His abiding interest in the combination of Moroccan popular practices and languages with cinematic and artistic modernism is present across his remarkable oeuvre.

Six and Twelve (Six et Douze)

Combining a hard bebop soundtrack with stunning black and white cinematography and a radical editing style, Six and Twelve presents six hours of a Casablanca morning.

Memory 14 (Mémoire 14), Ahmed Bouanani Synopsis: In the late 1960s, Ahmed Bouanani—working as an editor for the CCM—was “exiled” to the organization’s cinematic archives as a punishment for alleged leftist sympathies. Turning the assignment to his advantage, he made a found-footage film that repurposed the documentaries produced by the French during the colonial period to a strong anticolonial essay film. While censored by the Moroccan authorities to just a fifth of its original running time, this film—which also deploys Bouanani’s interest in poetry and popular arts—is a testament to the resistance of Morocco’s inhabitants and the memory of social and cultural practices never entirely extinguished by the colonial project. <img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/eventive-static/ccf2a592354dd9182dadbff28da8ed5c.jpg" width="174" style="display: inline; float: left; margin: 0px 1em 1em 0px;">Bio: Ahmed Bouanani (1938-2011) was a filmmaker, poet, novelist, and painter. As filmmaker, he worked in many capacities as an editor, writer, and director. His sole feature-length film as director is Mirage (Assarab, 1979) but he directed and edited many more works of short fiction and documentary, including Six and Twelve (Six et Douze, 1968), Memory 14 (Mémoire 14, 1971) and The Four Springs (Les quatres sources, 1977). His abiding interest in the combination of Moroccan popular practices and languages with cinematic and artistic modernism is present across his remarkable oeuvre.

Memory 14 (Mémoire 14)

Ahmed Bouanani's film Memory 14 uses the relics of French colonial documentaries to make a profound statement on the violence of the colonial project and Moroccans' resistance to it.

About Some Meaningless Events (De quelques évènements sans signification) , Mostafa Derkaoui Synopsis: In January 1974, Mostafa Derkaoui returned to Casablanca from his studies at the film college in Łódź, Poland. Together with his brother Abdelkrim, he shot his first film in the city’s bars and streets, in the harbour and the poorer districts. The independently produced film was borne by a collective energy unique in the cultural history of the country, even if Moroccan cinema was only starting to develop at the time. Banned by the censors at the time of its release, this work of collectivity involved painters, actors, musicians and the filmmakers in a radical gesture of art against authoritarianism. <img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/eventive-static/28b11f13f791ef034fed01c8d30a7c5d.jpg" width="139" style="display: inline; float: left; margin: 0px 1em 1em 0px;">Bio: Mostafa Derkaoui was born in Oujda, Morocco in 1944. Between 1963 and 1964, he studied at the French film school Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC, now La Fémis) in Paris before studying at the Polish film school Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Filmowa i Teatralna in Łódź from 1965 to 1972. In 1974, Derkaoui and his brother founded the production company Basma Productions. About Some Meaningless Events was his first feature-length film.

About Some Meaningless Events (De quelques évènements sans signification)

A band of filmmakers looking for a subject to deal with questions some youth from Casablanca about their expectations and their relations to Moroccan cinema. When they witness a crime committed by a dissatisfied dock worker who accidentally kills his boss, they decide to take a closer look at this particular case. Their investigation into the motives of the crime pushes them to reflect on their conception of cinema and the role of the artist in society.

Cinematic Archives, Preservation, and Circulation in the Maghreb Livestream Panel Discussion:&nbsp;October 24 at 3 pm EDT This panel discussion will address the question of archives—ArteEast’s archive and the fragile cinematic archives of Arab and North African cinema—and the urgent demands of preservation and recirculation of work that is at risk of disappearance. Limbrick will speak with Léa Morin, an independent curator and researcher based in Morocco and France, about her work restoring the film&nbsp;Ali in Wonderland&nbsp;(1 976) and other North African films; and with Touda Bouanani, video artist and archivist based in Rabat, Morocco, on recovering the legacy of her father Ahmed Bouanani’s cinema and writing. Touda Bouanani’s work has involved creative forms of visual documentation and preservation, as well as the re-editing and publication of Ahmed Bouanani’s landmark history of Moroccan cinema,&nbsp;La septième porte&nbsp;(The Seventh Gate). They’ll be joined by Sido Lansari (Cinémathèque de Tanger) who will discuss this important institution in the cinematic life of Morocco and its work of screening and archiving. Panelists:Peter Limbrick:Peter Limbrick is Professor of<a href="https://film.ucsc.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">&nbsp;Film and Digital Media</a>&nbsp;at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of two books:&nbsp;Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi&nbsp;(University of California Press, 2020) and&nbsp;Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand&nbsp;(Palgrave, 2010). In addition, he has published articles on Arab cinema, postcolonial and transnational film and video, and queer theory. He has also curated several film and video programs, including a retrospective of the work of Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi, which traveled to the Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA, USA), the Block Cinema (Chicago, USA) and Tate Modern (London, UK). Léa Morin :Léa Morin is an independent curator and researcher. She is co-founder of l’Observatoire (Art et Recherche) in Casablanca. She is engaged in projects of editing, exhibition, and restoration) that bring together researchers, artists and practitioners. Her research attempts to contribute to a better knowledge of artistic and especially cinematic modernities that have been rendered invisible by dominant narratives. She is especially interested in the circulation of ideas, forms, aesthetics, and political and artistic struggles in the period of independence movements (1960s and 1970s) and in the stakes of cultural decolonization. She is one of the directors of Talitha, nonprofit organization devoted to alternative and experimental cinematic and sound archives, preservation, and redistribution.&nbsp; Touda Bouanani:Touda Bouanani graduated from Ecole des Beaux Arts of Bordeaux in 1994. Through a singular approach and dedication to the literary and cinematographic work of her father, the artist Ahmed Bouanani, she explores photography, drawing, re-drawing, to re-creates and re-assembles a family universe where history meets fiction. ﻿Sido Mohamed LansariSido works as the director and head of programming of Cinémathèque de Tanger, North Africa’s first art house cinema and film archive, since 2019. He holds a Master’s degree in marketing and cultural management. In 2011, he joined the Contemporary Arts Biennale and Dance Biennale in Lyon team for two years. In 2020, he founded&nbsp;Divine, an online fanzine dedicated to arts and freedom of speech during the Covid19 lockdown. Sido is also a visual artist and an award-winning filmmaker. He is a member of NAAS – Network of Arab Alternative Screens. Cinémathèque de Tanger is a non-profit association created in 2006 and based in Tangier, Morocco. It is committed to the promotion of world cinema in Morocco, and Moroccan cinema in the world. It offers a collection of documentary films, feature films, experimental films, and artists’ videos, proposing educational activities and creating a platform for dialogue and encounters catered towards cinema professionals. ﻿Cinematic Archives, Preservation, and Circulation in the Maghreb&nbsp;is presented as part of Alternative Archives, a series of programs that explore themes of storytelling, archiving and evolving technologies in the digital world as they relate to the SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) region. Alternative Archives is presented in partnership with the Arab American National Musuem, NYU’s Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture &amp; Design,&nbsp;Honolulu Museum of Art. This program is co-sponsored by the Center for the Middle East and North Africa at UC Santa Cruz

Panel Discussion: Cinematic Archives, Preservation, and Circulation in the Maghreb

RADICAL MODERNISMS: RETRACING ARAB AND NORTH AFRICAN FILM HISTORIES (Part 2)

Virtual Admission

Conversation between Filmmaker Mona Benyamin and curator Line Ajan

Donation to ArteEast

Donate

Gift Cards

These are all the passes tied to your account. Now, use our online schedule to reserve tickets. You can access your tickets via {{my_tickets_link|"My Tickets"}} or via the PDFs attached to each ticket order confirmation email. {{buy_pass_link|Looking to buy more passes?}}

These are all your purchased tickets. Open this page on your phone, and at the door tap the "Show Barcode" button and show your screen to the attendant. Prefer paper? Print the PDF attached to the order confirmation email, or click one of the gears below and select "Download tickets PDF". If purchasing multiple tickets, be sure to print or show each unique ticket barcode.

None available

Passes

Explore our on-demand program here, and head over to the {{livestreams|Live Streams}} tab to see recordings of conversations with filmmakers and upcoming livestreams.

Unpacking the ArteArchive highlights ArteEast’s film and video archive, presenting independent video and filmmakers from the Middle East, North Africa and their diasporas 

Check out recordings of our past conversations with filmmakers, and upcoming livestreams!