The Masterclasses of the 2018 session are based on three themes: music, aesthetic choices and the future of independent cinema and criticism in Africa and the Arab world. At the same time different and complementary, these three questions are at the center of the reflection on cinema which is part of the DNA of the Carthage Film Festival.
This year's master classes will be given by three film personalities: Amine Bouhafa, Mahamat Saleh Haroun and Ibrahim Al Ariss.
The first master class will revolve around film music and will be conducted by Amine Bouhafa, French-Tunisian composer, winner of the French César for best film music, for Timbuktu, by Abderahmane Sissako. The second will be given by Mahamat Saleh Haroun and will focus on his creative career and his aesthetic choices. Winner of the Grand Jury prize in Cannes and in Carthage, Haroun is considered the bearer of a singular cinematographic project. The third masterclass will address the theme of film critique in Africa and the Arab world as well as the future of independent cinema in our countries. This third meeting will be led by Ibrahim AL Ariss, a renowned Lebanese critic, historian and journalist.
Formerly reserved for students, researchers or film professionals, the master classes of the JCC are now a space for exchange, sharing and transmission, accessible to wider audiences.

Amine Bouhafa is a Tunisian musician and film scoring composer. He started playing piano at age three and at seven he joined the Tunis Conservatoiry.

At fifteen he started composing music for films.
In 2014, he composed Abderahmane Sissako's Timbuktu soundratck, receiving the 2015 Cesars award for Best Original Music.

He worked with Kaouther Ben Hania, Souleymane Cisse and Assad Fouladkar.

Mahamet Saleh Haroun is a Chadian director born in 1961. In 1982, he moved to France.
After studying cinema at the Conservatoire Libre du Cinéma Français, he trained in journalism at the IUT of Bordeaux.

He also works in several regional dailies and in 1991 He made his first short film Tan Koul.
In 1999, he directed his first feature Bye Bye Africa. He obtained, thanks to his fourth feature film A screaming man, Jury Prize winner at the Cannes Film Festival.
The same festival of which he is a member of the jury the following year.
From February 2017 til February 2018, he was Minister of Tourism Development, Culture and Handicrafts of Chad.

A journalist, film critic and translator, he also does research on cultural history.
Born in Beirut in 1945, he studied film directing in Rome and scriptwriting and the art of film criticism in London.
He has translated over 40 works on film, philosophy and economics in English, French and Italian.
He has written many books on cinema, in particular on Youssef Chahine and Martin Scorsese.
He probes the issue of films and society in the Arab world and has published a three-part critical dictionary on the topic.
He currently runs Al Hayat's newspaper film section in Beirut, where he writes a daily chronicle on world cultural history.