The Carthage Film Festival of November 2021 is not only the favorite spot for different films, filmmakers and cinephiles to meet, but also the space for reflection and exchange, as well as the privileged setting to get acquainted with approaches of the authors and the actors of the filmic creation.
It is the occasion for a fruitful and generative dialogue where regular cinephiles of the Carthage Film Festival try to seize all the complexity of the emergence of one film which is no longer confined to the work of the author, but is in fact the material of a vision and the subject of a debate.
The fact that contemporary thinking is bearing the film as an object has generated some new behaviors and attitudes towards the filmic creation. This historical division is an undeniable fact, but is also too focused on the European and North American experience, which does not sufficiently account for the inventiveness of modernity and the invention of the future in any other region. The purpose is to give means of reflection on time and space in their polycentric dimension, history, geography and art combined.
On the basis that cinema secretes an imaginary that arouses other imaginaries, a prior question arises: Is this dynamic freed from the geographical, cultural, patrimonial and religious affiliations that the filmmaker endures or from the aspirations that the viewer expects?
However, which approaches and strategies should be adopted to let this imaginary be par excellence the source of renewal and sustainability of the Arab and African being and establish new conceptual spirits and smart and updated ways to manifest?
Without shielding ourselves into hermetic borders for fear of being diluted into the complex twists and turns of the new world order and the «holy» normalization, our appropriation of the technological device probably, even undoubtedly, places us in the modernity of the filmic praxis.
Hamadi BOUABID
Head of the Master Class section
