Documentary Filmmaking in the Middle East and North Africa

Viola Shafik studied Film and Middle Eastern Studies in Hamburg and works as a film scholar, creative consultant, and filmmaker. She has directed several documentaries, most notably My Name Is Not Ali (2011) and Arij: Scent of Revolution (2014). She is the author of Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class, and Nation (AUC Press, 2007) and Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (revised and updated edition, AUC Press, 2016).

Contributors
Introduction: Histories of Documentary South and East of the Mediterranean (MENA)
Viola Shafik

Histories and Structures
1. Newsfilm Exhibition and Reception in Egypt in the Pages of al-Suwwar al-mutaharrika, 1923–25
Mohannad Ghawanmeh

2. Documenting Lebanon
Mohamad Soueid

3. Documentary Filmmaking in Iraq
Ali Abudlameer

4. Palestine Fights—A Look behind the Scenes of PLO-GDR Cooperation in Film-Making
Irit Neidhardt

5. The Will to Expose: Documentary Filmmaking in Postrevolutionary Tunisia
Nouri Gana

6. Algerian War for Independence: Documentaries Questioning History
Ahmed Bedjaoui

7. Short History of Moroccan Non-fiction Film
Ali Essafi

8. Funding the “Creative Documentary”. An Art Cinema of Refugees
Kay Dickinson and Viviane Saglier

9. Arab Documentary Landscapes. Transnational Flow of Solidarity at Festivals
Stefanie van der Peer

Aesthetics/Politics of Representation
10. Negative / Positive: Newsreels in Nasserite Egypt and the Crafting of National Identity
Yasmin Desouki

11. From Poetics of Revolution to the Poetics of the Human. Voice-Over in Egyptian Documentary 1956–82
Viola Shafik

12. From Silhouettes to Superstars. Documenting Aids/HIV in Egyptian Cinema
Hend Alawadhi

13. Me and Not Me. The Personal-Collective Voice of First Person Films from the Egyptian Revolution
Alisa Lebow

14. ‘Gardening a pitiless mountain dreamed of faraway with its owner only a passing shadow’
Oraib Toukan

15. The Arab Jew and the Inscription of Memory
Ella Shohat

16. Grappling with Israel. From Sontag to Lacan and the Maoists in Between
Hanan Toukan

17. Political Issues in Tunisian Women’s Cinema
Mathilde Rouxel

18. Cinema and the Struggle of Women in Algeria
Olivier Hadouchi

19. Spaces of Dispossession. Experiments with the Real in Contemporary Algerian Cinema
Peter Limbrick

20. The Daring Lyrics of Women Music Documentary Filmmakers in the Maghreb Florence Martin

21. 300 km South of Marrakech. Imider, Artivism and the Environmental Documentary in Morocco
Jamal Bahmad

22. Screen Fighters: Filming and Killing in Contemporary Syria
Donatella della Ratta

Filmmakers and Individual Works
22. Jean Chamoun. Lebanon’s Suspended History
Hady Zaccak

23. Paper Airplanes. An Interview with Akram Zaatari
Dore Bowen

24. Opaque Encounters in Films About Palestine: Kamal Aljafari
Nadia Yaqub

25. Syria Portrayed in Two Documentaries by Omar Amiralay
Ahmad Izzo

26. The Berlin Ashlaa-Incident. A Letter to Filmmaker Hakim Belabbes
Stefan Pethke

27. The UAE’s Nujoom Alghanem. The Past, the Present, the Nation and the Individual Alia Yunis

28. Iraq War Home Movies. Abbas Fahdel’s Long Format, Slow Documentary Homeland Shohini Chaudhuri