To create a dialogue between cinema and thought is our horizon in this section of the festival that we are conducting this year in a formula that we want temporary, experimental, and necessarily unfinished: For three days, stakeholders in the field of cinema and academics will be invited to a common reflection on issues of cinema and their historical, political and philosophical extensions.
For this year, we have chosen to debate a question that starts from observations which, due to their permanence, become problematic and open to further reflection: The reception of Arab films in the legitimizing bodies that are the international film festivals and the almost obsessive quest for recognition that results from it among Arab filmmakers. This position is at first sight legitimate (and not necessarily limited to Arab filmmakers) but it implies allegiance to a «Center» perceived as powerful, «knowing», legitimizing and ultimately imposing a certain Cinema. That of discourse, of «cultural anchoring», of political testimony. A Cinema «reflection» of this Orient as we would like to see it and represent it to ourselves, a Cinema of identity assignment that evacuates this part of art from the principle of any filmic work. The corollary of this symbolic power of legitimization is the internalization (conscious or unconscious) by the filmmakers from here of an implicit specification that ends up perpetuating a message and a form in congruence with the expectations expressed by the omniscient and legitimizing bodies that are the major film festivals.
It is not a question of making a generalization that would be unfair to certain festivals and a certain Arab Cinema, and even less of giving in to «conspiracy» paranoia, but rather of pointing out a tendency that seems to us, due to its persistence over time, to have induced a «formatting» of filmic forms.
Our ambition is to debate this «naturalized» and «undisputed» power of legitimization and the expression of «the demand for recognition that it encloses», to explore what is at the root of it and what follows from it in terms of political, historical and cultural stakes through a triple prism:
Decolonial and post-colonial studies
Aesthetics and art theory
Cultural History
