CRITICAL WRITING WORKSHOP

Writing about a film is ideally an act of generosity, during which emotions translated into a proposition of meaning are proposed for sharing. From a more political perspective, film critique is also an act of authority, that of taste, of knowledge, of ideology.Therefore, it also operates as an instance of legitimization in contexts where it is perceived as legitimate. A somewhat cavalier history of the writings on Cinema in Tunisia highlights its atomization, its discretion and the little credit it has always enjoyed both with potential audiences of films and filmmakers. There have been and there will always be in Tunisia brilliant pens but never an active institution. This lack of legitimacy could be explained by the difficulty that film criticism has always had in situating itself between academic criticism, which produces, in the best of cases, soulless scholarly glosses, and hegemonic «cultural» journalism, whose impressionistic «papers» at best manage to grasp the thematic stakes of a film. This failure of the critique explains and participates in its own way in this perpetual quest for recognition by the Other that inhabits producers and directors at the origin of numerous misunderstandings and impostures as well as their systematic aversion to any aesthetic judgment coming «from HERE» if it is not laudatory. Based on these observations, our ambition through this workshop is to bring our contribution (as minor as it may be) to the emergence of new writers animated by the love of Cinema and driven by the desire to write. Beyond writing, this workshop also aims to be a place of reflection on the present and the future of cinema. The sessions will be co-directed by Saad Chakali & Alexia Roux, film critics in Le Rayon Vert Journal and Ali Adawy, critic and researcher in Cinema. This workshop will bring together ten participants selected by the mentors from among young journalists, researchers and students who have already written about cinema.