Arab Cinema in One Week
Letters to the past and the future
It's 1985, a year before I was born. In Belgrade, the winter has loosened its grip, though its memory lingers in the bones and in the rationing of coffee, electricity and fuel. For twenty-four consecutive, blistering winter days in December and January, the daily temperature never rose above 0 °C. It was one of the longest freezing streaks in the city's recorded history. Now the cold and the blackouts have subsided and in an office on 6 Lenin Street, warmed by little more than resolve, someone, or several someones, bend over a page, searching for words of solidarity that Yugoslav women might send to the Palestinian women due to gather in Tunis.
It's the same year, and spring lingers over Tunis as April turns to May. The air is mild and the light gentle. Inside the Hotel Amilcar, the Fourth Conference of the General Federation of Palestinian Women is in session. In attendance are “Palestinian sisters” who spent long years in the Zionist occupation's prisons, freed from captivity in late 1983. Some important men sit in the front row. A representative of the Federal Conference for the Issues of the Social Status of Women of Yugoslavia is about to deliver the greetings that travelled down the Adriatic and across the Mediterranean, a message carried by the same waters that touched different shores. She begins;
“Dear comrades,
I am very pleased to have the honour of conveying greetings to you on behalf of the Conference for the Issues of the Social Status of Women of Yugoslavia, and on behalf of all the women of Yugoslavia I thank you for the invitation you extended to the conference, and I hope that the work of your conference will be crowned with success.
[...]
The people of Yugoslavia and the women of Yugoslavia are aware of your just struggle for freedom and for the establishment of a free, independent Palestinian state, and of the difficulties you face in your popular liberation struggle. The contribution of women to your struggle is immense and an integral part of it. Without it, the goal, which is freedom, cannot be achieved.
The women of Yugoslavia, [...], led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, entered the field of struggle against fascism and Nazism and their collaborators during the Second World War. These days, and specifically on May 9th, Yugoslavia celebrates the victory over fascism, a victory achieved through the common struggle alongside other progressive peoples and nations, in which all the peoples and nationalities of Yugoslavia actively participated, including women on an equal footing. As we mark this anniversary, we highlight the great contribution women made to the people's liberation struggle and to the development of socialism. Since we ourselves have this experience, we sincerely affirm our support for your just struggle. We too lived through the siege of war and the fight for liberation, and at the same time, together with the other progressive forces in our society, our socio-political system declared the principles of a socialist society, in which men and women participate equally in all areas of decision-making. This is guaranteed by the constitution and laws of our socialist self-managing country.
[...]
We still encounter certain difficulties, and we must keep working for the consistent application of the constitution and the law, until the remnants of patriarchal consciousness and traditions are completely overcome, and until all the rights women gained through their contribution to the people's war, the revolution and the rebuilding of the country after the war are fully and lastingly realised. Women, the working class and all working people today take part in carrying out the tasks of completing the development of the political system of socialist self-management, accelerating material prosperity, completing the economic stabilisation program, strengthening brotherhood and unity among our nations and nationalities, and holding firm in international relations on the basis of the principles and aims of the policy of non-alignment, whose foundations were laid during President Tito's lifetime.
[...]
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia [...] unequivocally support the struggle of the Palestinian people and insist on Israel's withdrawal, without conditions or restrictions, from all the Arab and Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, and for the realisation of the Palestinian people's inalienable rights to self-determination, independence and sovereignty, and to the establishment of their own state on their own land. [...]
[...]
Dear comrades, I wish once more that your conference's proceedings will be crowned with success, and that you will continue to improve the situation of Palestinian women. I also express our readiness to continue cooperation between the General Federation of Palestinian Women and the Conference for the Issues of the Social Status of Women of Yugoslavia.”
It's October 2026, and the weather in London has turned. The summer was apocalyptic. The heat that pressed down on the city for weeks left the parks faded to a dusty orange I have never seen here before. Now autumn seems to be arriving, and I am relieved by its crispness. My hands are cold.
I sit to read these messages from the past once more. The pages are cream-coloured and slightly skewed in their scans. I am using modern technology to decipher them, feeding the scans into a machine that reads the Arabic lines that I cannot. I am reminded that I really should have committed to learning the language. Maybe it's not too late. I should really do it soon.
I notice that page 3 of the speech appears to be missing. The numbers run 2, then 4, and I wonder whether it’s a typo, a slip of the numbering, or whether a whole page really is gone. Was it lost, misfiled, never scanned or kept? Did it even exist?
I think about the gaps in archives, and about my desire to fill them. I think about time travel and generational disappointments, and I wonder if the women in that hall thought of this too. I scan the photograph of the meeting held at the sidelines of the conference for signs of this. Impossible to know.
Just a few short months following the conference, on 1 October 1985, in an operation they called Wooden Leg, Israeli jets bombed the PLO's headquarters outside Tunis. In Belgrade, the brotherhood and unity named in the speech has a few years left, and the stabilisation programme will give way to inflation, then to war, and the country that sent the greeting will be gone before I am old enough to remember it.
In Celtic Christian tradition, a thin place is where two realms press so closely they almost touch. As I disappear deeper into the letters and speeches, I find myself in the orbit of familiar vocabulary. Time starts to feel like a thin place too. The distance between these pages and today feels more permeable than linear chronology allows. I am caught in the arc of a returning boomerang, suspended in constellations, not timelines.
Today, a free Palestine has yet to arrive. But we promise that it will. We insist that it will.
Prompted by Munira Khayyat, I think about what tense all this belongs in. I think about October. I think about ellipses. You sit in them too. Are the three dots comfortable?
I ask myself if time is a traitor and the archive a trickster. I drift into a daydream about the women at that conference, tasting freedom after years in the occupation's prisons. I think of the letters and poems I have written for almost two years to a friend who is held in one of those prisons today. Letters I cannot send. I think about his freedom as a debt that is owed to the sky.
Outside, the Sunday light is low. The sun slants in through my windows, bringing with it an unnerving sense of calm. I realise that I have already resolved to write in the present. I pour a second cup of coffee, and turn to another letter. I begin;
Dear A,
[...]
Angelina Radaković
London, UK
Arab cinema means different things to different audiences.
Here, it means Arab art films. Before you dismiss this distinction as elitist, the curator of Arab Cinema Week, Rabih El-Khoury is far from dictatorial. He emphasises collaboration above all. 'You don't curate a programme alone,' he says. 'The audience comes first.'
El-Khoury's idea of a good selection is that 'it has to be as eclectic as possible' while also responsive to wider contexts such as the city and its population, the venue as a space and its history of screenings, among other things.
Ultimately, El-Khoury and Cinema Akil wanted the most contemporary Arab films ー new stuff; brand new. To wit, the oldest films in the line-up are two shorts from 2020. The only classic included is a restored black–and-white gem from the dawn of Third Cinema, Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers).
Vive l'Algérie!
This year marks 60 years of Algerian independence, and the Archives Numériques du Cinéma Algérien reminds us of 60 years of Algerian cinema (not counting colonial Algerian cinema of course.) Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina's landmark The Winds of the Aures (1967) is one early example and later, Lakhdar-Hamina's Chronicle of the Years of Fire (1975) would win the as-yet only Palme d'Or for an Arabic film. An amusingly cunning and shrewd inclusion, carefully placed as the closing film and the only one shown in the open air, The Battle of Algiers, that helped establish the aesthetics of militant cinema, was famously screened in guerrilla hideouts in Latin America and beyond, across the global south.
'We wanted to have a focus,' El-Khoury explains, 'and to reflect on an Algeria of the past, the present and the future. We did not want to offer only a panorama of new Arab films.'
Strikingly, in The Battle of Algiers, Yacef Saadi plays himself; and in Soula the eponymous character plays herself, both having co-written their respective films. As national hero in the film, Saadi was also in power at the time, off-screen. The latter also plays herself, based on her real-life experience as an unwed and ostracised teenage mother. This juxtaposition speaks volumes about our postcolonial history and thinking, strongly informed by intersectional feminism, the long journey between Algerian and post-independence Arab cinema, and arguably a post-2011 new wave. Indeed, an element of re-enactment is present in Héliopolis (2021), with Algerian and French actors playing their historical and fictitious ancestors, and by extension, themselves, under neocolonialism.
And here come the political follies of history, or as Chris Marker says, 'the heartbreaks of history.' In Héliopolis, the Sétif and Guelma massacres take place soon after colonised Algerians parade to celebrate victory over Nazi Germany. Algiers was the de facto capital of free France. Flash forward to present-day Algeria where, in Karim Aïnouz's Mariner of the Mountains (2021), the Algerian-Brazilian writer, director and narrator of this essayistic and autobiographical film, is shocked when he meets a young Algerian man who wishes that the French had never left. The young man speaks of unemployment and hangs out with similarly suffering fellows while looking out at the sea and to further shores.
For all the heartbreak of human history in these and other films in Cinema Akil's Arab Cinema Week, it also had its share of happy days. Despite the gloom, dark comedy, agony, anger, violence, and real-life horror showcased in this line-up, there were glimmers of hope. At any rate, the closing riot scenes in The Battle of Algiers are my own self-prescribed happy pills in film form, if not already one of the most cheerful moments in cinema history.
Arab Cinema Week also evoked several cinephilic and literary associations. The pied-noir militias and summary executions in Héliopolis are reminiscent of the Israeli undercover Mista'arvim death squads in Elia Suleiman's The Time That Remains (2009, starring Saleh Bakri, also the 2022 Beirut Hold'em's antihero.) In Suleiman's epic, the elementary school functions in parallel with the missionary schools contemplated in Mariner of the Mountains. The latter also speaks in so many ways to Jonas Mekas' Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972). Héliopolis also recalls Indigènes (2006). While the spectre of philosopher and post-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon haunts and looms, other (literary) authors are lurking: Consider that Will My Parents Come To See Me? (2022) ー where young Farah is slated for execution by Somalia's military firing squad over acts of terrorism ー could share the title of Victor Hugo's 1829 novel Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné, and how, for a moment, Aïnouz's father brings to mind the Juan Rulfo character of the ghostly father from his 1955 novel Pedro Páramo.
El-Khoury reminds me that he is anything but didactic. 'It's up to each of you to decide what to take from the films. I'm not here to teach anyone, anything.' I believe that if El-Khoury is not here as a teacher, he is a mediator and facilitator in the decolonised schoolroom of the cinema: consider the history lessons alone and how one would quickly look up acronyms like PPA, AML and FLN.
Palestine not in sight, yet visible
But hey, where is Palestine? No, this was not actually my question. El-Khoury highlighted some of the programming difficulties saying that 'budgets for culture were really shrinking.' Financial support for Arab cinema is still severely limited (and limiting). But here, El-Khoury cited another curious reason behind the total lack of Palestinian films. 'Cinema Akil has been championing Arab cinema, and especially Palestinian cinema. I couldn't screen a Palestinian film because everything has already played at Cinema Akil.' After all, this year saw the 8th Edition of their Reel Palestine Film Festival.
Enter Saleh Bakri. He's the programme's Palestinian representation; twice so. First, on-screen, and then in flesh and blood. To make up for the omission, and honour Palestine too, the prominent pan-Arab actor, whose vast filmography features emerging and established Palestinian, Lebanese, Moroccan and Emirati directors, conducted a 'highly emotional and extremely generous' masterclass that sold out at Arab Cinema Week. In turn, the screening of Beirut Hold'em also sold out.
What is Arab cinema?
'Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?' (What Is Cinema?) André Bazin's 1958 book title famously asks. Chacun son cinéma (To Each His Own Cinema) the 2007 multilingual film anthology answered. In 2022, the unflinchingly and subversively inclusive Arab Cinema Week invited us to ask, 'What is (Arab) cinema?' To reclaim, reappropriate and reinvent identities, traditions and film form.
Cinema and Arab cinema are also represented by 'emerging voices,' debuts and comebacks. Beirut Hold'em is Michel Kammoun's first film since Falafel (2006)! It is also represented by the Somali language, in Will My Parents Come to See Me? (2022) and The Gravedigger's Wife (2021). It is represented by Swahili spoken by a multiracial Yemeni woman in diaspora in another short (Don't Get Too Comfortable, 2021); by an Italian brother or comrade (Pontecorvo); and a Brazilian son (Aïnouz) whose Mariner of the Mountains, as El-Khoury unwaveringly puts it, 'feels as Arab as any other Arab film. So why not include this very important story about the Arab world at large and Algeria in particular, told from such a unique perspective?' We might as well recognise Aïnouz as Arab as any of us, Fanon as no less Arab, and Arab cinema as the cinema of exiles and diasporas.
Arab cinema is also Arab feminisms: Al-Sit (2020) is a Sudanese matriarch, and Becoming (2021) is a Saudi anthology of stories of menarche, miscarriage, female infertility, mother-daughter conflict, mother-son bonding, single mothers with husbands away for business, stay-at-home mothers, car-driving Saudi women and runaway brides. In the Tunisian short The Bath (2020) the female director observes, à la Kramer vs Kramer (1979), a father-son bonding complete with a heartwarming finale that, in my opinion, is one of the most intimate Arab father-son moments ever filmed.
Arab cinema is the real, the imagined, the go-betweens and in-betweeners. It's our memories, amnesias, personal archives, and complex narratives. It is pan-Arab, transnational, international, humane, humanistic and sometimes even anthropomorphic. Contemporary Arab film features animals prominently and more often than not in such a way that humanism is extended to non-humans. In Feathers (2021), a controlling husband turns into a chicken but mariticide occurs only when the chicken turns back into a man. In Beirut Hold'em, a sexually exhausted horse is lovingly caressed and taken to a seaside promenade.
Arab cinema is, triumphantly, for all. 'My ultimate personal success is when I've given everyone a taste of Arab cinema. Many people here in Dubai do not come from the Arab world, but still find something that links these films to their own histories. What better victory do you want?'
What We Plant, What We Owe
I grew up in a small village in southern Slovenia, surrounded by forests. My grandmother gathered herbs; my father and grandfather worked in forestry. From our elders, we learned that the forest gives and the forest takes. We also learned to take only what we needed, and to understand that the forest was not ours to possess.
This knowledge has stayed with me. It shapes how I think about our relationship with the living world, and how I approach the history of the Non-Aligned Movement: not only as a political project of decolonisation and independence, but also as an unfinished experiment in imagining how we might live together, across differences, without submitting to the centres of power.
At the founding conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961, political leaders planted plane trees. Similar ceremonies took place at later summits, with trees chosen for their particular meanings and origins. Flowers, too, were carefully arranged for meetings and diplomatic encounters. These gestures might seem ceremonial, even ornamental. Yet a tree is never only a symbol. It takes root in a particular place, draws water from the earth, grows through time, and outlives those who plant it. It reminds us that political futures, like forests, require conditions in which different forms of life can exist together. But still, we must ask. Who plants, and on whose land? Who decides what should grow, what must be cleared, and which forms of life are considered expendable? The planting of trees, like the language of conservation itself, can also carry the legacy of colonial control over land and people. Colonial forestry turned forests into sources of timber and revenue, closing them to those who had lived from them for generations. Many protected areas were created by displacing the very communities who had cared for the land.
Environmental concerns were not at the centre of the Non-Aligned Movement’s early programme. Gradually, however, ecological balance became inseparable from issues of sovereignty, development and global inequality. The point was larger than protecting nature: it was to ask who profited from its destruction, who controlled its resources, and who was expected to pay the price. These questions remain urgent.
From oil extraction and poisoned landscapes to deforestation and the destruction of ecosystems through war, environmental devastation follows the unequal distribution of power. In Gaza today, the destruction of land, water, farms and olive groves, what many describe as ecocide, shows how the erasure of a people and the erasure of their living environment go hand in hand. To uproot an olive grove is to undo the act of planting, and with it a people’s claim to a future on their own land. There is only one Earth, but we do not inhabit it on equal terms.
Perhaps flowers and trees offer a way of thinking about solidarity beyond political declarations. Not as a universal language that erases differences, but as a practice grounded in specific places, histories and responsibilities. A seed carries the possibility of a future, but never guarantees it. What grows depends on the soil, the climate, the hands that tend it, and the forces that threaten its survival.
To return to the Non-Aligned Movement today is not to restore an idealised past. It is to ask what remains of its unfinished promises, and what new forms of solidarity they might make possible. What would it mean to treat the Earth not as property or an inexhaustible resource, but as a shared condition of life?
We are guests here.
Bojana Piškur
Ljubljana, Slovenia
About the Non-Aligned Constellations Working Group
Grounded in the concept of ‘constellations’ and derived from the Southern Constellations exhibition series (launched in 2019 at Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, Slovenia), this research explores the intersection of art, history, and geography, with a particular focus on the global relationships fostered through the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The project investigates the legacy of the Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries Josip Broz Tito (Titograd, 1981–1995), whose collection, comprising 800 works from 56 NAM countries, is now housed at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro. Curators Angelina Radaković, Bojana Piškur, and Natalija Vujošević (the initiator of the Art Collection of Non-Aligned Countries Laboratory project at MSUCG) aim to revive the collection through participatory, experimental, and interdisciplinary methods. By engaging with its historical and political context, they seek to reestablish connections with cultural actors from the Global South. Tracing the exchanges of solidarity, this project will reframe the artworks, offering new perspectives on the cultural and political dialogues that shaped both the past and present.
Bojana Piškur is a senior curator at Moderna galerija in Ljubljana. Her research and curatorial work focus on the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav context, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the evolving concept of the ‘East(s)’. Since 2019, Piškur has curated and co-curated Southern Constellations exhibitions at institutions such as Moderna galerija (Ljubljana), Asia Culture Center, Gwangju (South Korea), Filodrammatica Gallery (Rijeka, Croatia), Museumof Contemporary Art of Montenegro (Podgorica), the Qattan Foundation (Ramallah, Palestine), National Opera and Ballet (Skopje, North Macedonia), and The Mosaic Rooms (London, UK).
Bodies expanding, bodies contracting
I will tell you exactly where the Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries is located in my memory, in my body, and in the body of the building itself.
It was sometime around 1986, and I was a ten-year-old girl. As part of a school activity, we visited the Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries “Josip Broz Tito.” The Gallery was housed in the Petrović Palace, in Kruševac Park. We are in the attic, and it is crowded. The air is stuffy, my sweater is itching, I can feel myself sweating, and my feet hurt because of my flat arches. We are having a music lesson, looking at a collection of musical instruments from Indonesia, Burma, and Congo. Our teacher tells us that we belong to the Non-Aligned Movement. She explains that these instruments were gifts to the Gallery from friendly countries. She tells us that, together with these countries, we form a community committed to peaceful coexistence, one that refuses to join military alliances seeking to dominate others through the law of the strongest. She speaks about anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics, and about how the community of non-aligned countries holds a different vision of the world, one in which relationships are built on mutual support, respect for others, and recognition of differences.
I do not know how much of the political language our teacher used to explain non-alignment I understood at the time. But I clearly remember the feeling that came with realizing that we belonged to something much larger than the country we lived in. My itchy, sweaty body expands from within, and I am filled with a joyful sense of belonging, pride, and responsibility.
Today, this memory feels like an abandoned utopia. But that utopia had its own public infrastructure. The building has shrunk and fallen into neglect. Since the 1990s, three different institutions have occupied it. Behind it, a new and much larger building housing the American Embassy has appeared. For decades, the collection has remained largely out of public view, while the struggle to bring it back into public life continues, with uncertain outcomes.
For years, researchers supported by grants from European, Canadian, and American universities have been visiting the museum to study and write about the non-aligned collection. Their interest often makes an important contribution to the collection’s visibility and understanding. Yet the question remains of how the resources, authority, and outcomes of such research are distributed. Who gets the opportunity to produce knowledge, build an academic career, and determine interpretive frameworks, and who remains the custodian of archival materials and a provider of information? Do the methodologies and principles underpinning these research relationships reflect the very values that are the subject of the research itself? Are these relationships anti-colonial, reciprocal, and grounded in solidarity?
Young people from the local community who visit the museum know almost nothing about this heritage, or about the Non-Aligned Movement. Their political education takes place within the horizon of Euro-Atlantic integration and the market economy, while historical experiences of alternative forms of international relations have almost disappeared from public education. At the same time, cultural heritage is increasingly valued in terms of its tourism and market potential.
In the post-Cold War order, marked by new forms of neocolonial domination, the heritage of non-alignment is becoming increasingly visible within international academia, while remaining difficult to access for the communities from which it emerged. It acquires new value as an object of research, but not necessarily as public knowledge or social practice. Today, narratives surrounding the political imagination of non-alignment circulate predominantly through the channels of Western academia and within the specialized discourse of contemporary art, in publications and at panels where access is restricted by class, economic, and institutional barriers.
These barriers determine whose bodies can expand from within today, and whose contract. They are not merely obstacles to accessing information, but part of a broader asymmetrical distribution of resources, knowledge, and the possibility of imagining the world differently. In postsocialist societies, where decades of privatization have transformed material and collectively held goods, the question arises whether a similar fate threatens heritage, ideas, and political imagination itself.
I wonder how we can learn from the Non-Aligned Movement today without turning its heritage into yet another resource for academic and market valorization. How can we re-establish the principles of solidarity, reciprocity, and collective action as practices, beginning with research exchanges and the production of knowledge themselves? How can we once again create places where bodies can expand from within, where knowledge can generate a sense of belonging, solidarity, and the possibility of imagining the world differently?
And who will have access to those places?
Natalija Vujošević,
Podgorica, Montenegro
About the Non-Aligned Constellations Working Group
Grounded in the concept of ‘constellations’ and derived from the Southern Constellations exhibition series (launched in 2019 at Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, Slovenia), this research explores the intersection of art, history, and geography, with a particular focus on the global relationships fostered through the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The project investigates the legacy of the Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries Josip Broz Tito (Titograd, 1981–1995), whose collection, comprising 800 works from 56 NAM countries, is now housed at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro. Curators Angelina Radaković, Bojana Piškur, and Natalija Vujošević (the initiator of the Art Collection of Non-Aligned Countries Laboratory project at MSUCG) aim to revive the collection through participatory, experimental, and interdisciplinary methods. By engaging with its historical and political context, they seek to reestablish connections with cultural actors from the Global South. Tracing the exchanges of solidarity, this project will reframe the artworks, offering new perspectives on the cultural and political dialogues that shaped both the past and present.
Natalija Vujošević is a curator, researcher and cultural organiser based in Montenegro. Her work is particularly concerned with Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cultural and political histories and with the relationships between historical material, institutional memory, and contemporary conditions. In 2024, she received the Igor Zabel Grant, awarded in recognition of outstanding achievements by curators, art historians, theorists, writers, and critics working in the field of visual.
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