EUME Discussion
Do. 04 Juni 2015 | 19:30–22:00

Women in the Political History of Egypt

Film screening of "Four Women from Egypt" by Tahani Rached; Discussant: Clare Davies (Irmgard Coninx Prize Fellow 2014/2015)

Werkstatt der Kulturen, Wissmannstraße 32, 12049 Berlin

Film: Four Women from Egypt
by Tahani Rached
Egypt 1998
Documentary, 90 min, Arabic ENG ST

Guest: Clare Davies

This is the third part of the "Beyond Spring: Arab Film Series" from May 21 - June 6 in cooperation with Mayadin al-Tahrir e. V. and the Werkstatt der Kulturen.

Meanwhile this film has become a historical document itself. It presents four female Egyptian activists from different ideological and social backgrounds. Their personal accounts shed light on the political history of their country since Nasser’s revolution in 1952 and on the challenges of female political participation.

Tahani Rached was born in 1947 in Cairo and studied at the art school in Montreal for two years before working in different community groups. In the early seventies she turned to cinema and began her career as a filmmaker in 1973 with the documentary Pour faire changement. Since then she has made than twenty films and videos. Between 1981 and 2010 she worked for the Office National du Film du Canada/National Film Board of Canada. She is considered the most important Egyptian documentary filmmaker.

Clare Davies is an art historian whose research focuses on the histories of art practice in Egypt and the Arab world, as well as historiographies of non-Western art of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries. Her recently completed doctoral dissertation explores the ways in which artists, patrons, and art audiences negotiated the parameters of a proposed “modern Egyptian art object” in relation to dominant imaginaries of urban space, colonial- and postcolonial-era cultural politics, the circulation of commodities between European colonial powers and Egypt, and strategic forms of collaborative organization leveraged by and on behalf of artists.
Davies majored in Rhetoric with concentrations in LGBTI studies and art practice at the University of California, Berkeley before receiving an MA in modern and post-war European and American art from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2008, and a PhD from the same institution in 2014. As a freelance researcher for CULTNAT, she authored of an index of the historic photographic archive of the Egyptian Geographical Society. She writes regularly for contemporary arts publications.

Viola Shafik, PhD, is a freelance filmmaker, film curator and film scholar. She authored among others Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity, AUC-Press, Cairo, 1998 and Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class and Nation, AUC-Press, 2007. She lectured at the American University in Cairo and the Zürich University and is in the selection committee of the Rawi Screenwriters Lab and the Berlinale World Cinema Fund. She directed several documentaries, most notably Ali im Paradies/My Name is not Ali (2011) and Arij - Scent of Revolution (2014). Currently she teaches at the Humboldt University, Berlin and the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich.

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