Around the festival : Round table
3rd December 2014 at 3 pm - Africa Hotel
The space devoted to Arab and African cinema in European
theatres has become negligible compared to what it
used to be. The near absence of Arab and African images,
combined with the structural crisis of the exploitation
now operating in countries in the region, condemns the
majority of production to anonymity, except for a rather
confidential presence at major international festivals.
Crucial for the survival of the film industry in the region,
the problem of visibility of movies – beyond the economic
logic that it covers – is a matter of misunderstanding
between creators from the south, and funders and distributors
from the north on the type of movies potentially
exploitable in the circuit of European cinemas.
At
the heart of this misunderstanding, the question of the
perception of what today is supposed to be an Arab or
African film able to find an audience in a theatre in the
North. The appreciation of a film is not free of preconceptions
as to the «representative» character of a work of
art and the anticipations of the expectations of the Western
viewer, and there is a risk of finding the same kind
of «exotic» cinema calibrated for European audiences
taking centre stage.
In doing so, singular propositions,
fragile by virtue of their desire to break with the surrounding
formatting, will be de facto doomed for oblivion due
to lack of «representativeness».
Through this meeting, Carthage Film Festival aspires to
start a dialogue between creators, producers and distributors
from the North and the South in order to dispel
these misunderstandings and foreshadow more equitable
alternatives in the distribution of movies from the
South.
