Dr Zélie Asava is giving a talk on Franco-Maghrebi cinema next Tuesday, 25th March as part of the Silk Road Film Festival.
Exploring the Franco-Maghrebi Space Onscreen
Speaker: Dr Zélie Asava
Venue: Chester Beatty Library
Date: Tuesday 25th of March
Time: 15:30 – 16:00
Free Event
Françafrique is a term used in postcolonial discourse to refer to the neo-colonial relationship between France and its former African colonies, a political bond which has been rendered as personal in many films. This paper investigates the visualization of this in-between space in films on Franco-Maghrebi identity including Indigènes [Days of Glory] (Bouchareb, 2006), Caché [Hidden] (Haneke, 2005), Chouchou (Allouache, 2003), Drôle de Félix [The Adventures of Felix] (Ducastel & Martineau, 1999) and La Haine [Hate] (Kassovitz, 1995).
These films explore public and private identity through their considerations of masculinity, migration and multiculturalism in the Franco-Maghrebi space, and, through their Maghrebi protagonists attempt to express a transnational political subjectivity to counter-balance the voicelessness of Maghrebi-French communities in the European public sphere. This paper will interrogate the representational schema of key films, by exploring the cinematic stereotypes and taboos challenged and maintained in the film, in comparison to traditional beur cinema and established ideas of Maghrebi-French characters onscreen.
