cyprus cultural events - Mar 14: Tunisian Short Film Day at Sidestreets

Heidi Trautmann

Mar 14: Tunisian Short Film Day at Sidestreets 3/6/2013 curated/küratör (by) walid tayaa— METAPHORES &RESISTANCE/METAFORLAR & DİRENİŞ Thursday 14th March 2013/PERŞEMBE 14 MART 2013, 19.00, Sidestreets The program consists of 11 short Tunisian films. The total duration of screening is 151’ (3’ the shortest and 26’ the longest film). Curator and film director Walid Tayaa will be present at the screenings and the discussions. Yetin Aslan, film producer and Instructor at EMU is the coordinator of the program. (Filmler İngilizce alt yazılı olup, gösterim sonrası söyleşi de İngilizce dilinde gerçekleştirilecektir.) 11 kısa metrajlı Tunus filminden oluşan programda tüm filmler İngilizce altyazılıdır. Filmlerin gösterimi toplamda 151 dakikadır. (3’ en kısa film ve 26’ en uzun film). Program küratörü ve gösterilecek filmlerden birinin yönetmeni olan Walid Tayaa, gösterimler ve söyleşi sırasında Sidestreets’de sizlerle olacaktır. Yetin Arslan’ın (DAÜ öğretim üyesi ve Film Yapımcısı) koordine edeceği gösterim ve söyleşiler de İngilizce dilinde yapılacaktır. Total Duration : 151 min The Staduim by Alaéddine Slim 26min Coma By Alaéddine Abou Taléb 8min Tandid by Walid Mattar 15min Soubresauts by Leyla Bouzid 22min Le Rendez-vous by Sarra Abidi 15min Life by Walid Tayaa 18min Baba Noël by Walid Mattar 15min Lémrayyét by Nadia Raïs 18min Sur le Mur by Farés Ben Khalifa 3min Fils de Pauvreté by Nidhal Hsine 8min Kéch ma météch by Nadhir Bouslama 3min The program will be followed by a casual discussion period, over some refreshments. To get people to know Tunisia otherwise than the touristic country it is and beyond the clichés of television and the media, to know the post-revolutionary Tunisia. To know it through the cinema of this new generation. To understand through Art the reasons of the revolt. To have people discover these metaphors of entrapment and suffocation the new young generation has been using in their films. To understand and discover a particular artistic film movement of a youth unknown. There, it's moving, creating! Curator’s Statement: Before the 14th of January revolution and for many years, the political regime in Tunisia fostered a poor concept of culture and art, based on consuming bad art, generally understood as promotion festivals, variety television and restaurant artists. It was a regime that knew nothing of art and intellect, so the taste of the public had fallen to catastrophically low levels. It was a political concept of culture, reduced to entertainment and superficiality, for which hordes of associations and mercenaries received support, interest and media coverage. Free critical creative art was shattered and loyalty to the regime was imposed as a measure for creativity capacity. Despite this screaming ignorance and stifling siege, many artists remained steadfast, yearning for free expression and more refined public taste. The era of the previous regime was marked by narrow-mindedness and a discontent with daily life under a ‘schizophrenic’ regime that marketed the myth of the ‘ever-happy country’ and ‘oasis of security and peace.’ Public taste was overruled by mediocrity, and there was no horizon fort the young who found themselves caught in an endless cycle of monotony and boredom. Free expression, critical creativity and alternative art were not possible and associative, cultural and civil work, independent of the ruling party and the regime, was a form of resistance that the regime tried to suppress. Yet this oppression made some youths insist even more to express themselves, and many cultural movements like cine clubs and amateur movie makers were resolute, standing strong, like fortified citadels, in the face of dictatorship. Tunisian short films were not isolated from this suffocating political atmosphere and boring environment. Many young directors tried to express this situation in short movies and they were successful, partly due to new technical possibilities, but mainly carried by the new liberated creative thirst. The digital revolution freed youth from having to wait for decisions from support committees. Through independent and marginal production patterns that depended on austerity and on professional solidarity, they managed to create new directing stakes in expressing their individual artistic and cinematic concerns and views. It is worth noting that the amateur movie makers’ movement was at the forefront of austere production, creating very important films. Launched from a cultural climate that was determined by public issues these films suffered from severe restrictions in broadcasting and distributing and from massive harassment by the authorities. On the professional level, ‘Ten Shorts, Ten Visions’ is an experiment initiated by two independent Tunisian producers in 2006. It is an important and decisive beginning in adopting a new production pattern, represented in a strict way of working: two days of shooting, a small team, a modest budget. Since this experiment an active and enormous movement of short production has erupted on the Tunisian cinematic scene with the same austere concept. Up from no more than 5 films annually, the number of shorts reached 80 films in 2010. The desire of many young directors was also to overcome the inaction, stagnation and lack of diversity that characterized for a long time the conventionally directed films of the middle and old generations of directors. Marred by poor vision and presentation, their colorless films drowned in narcissism and were unable to express the current aesthetics. The audience was frustrated and accused Tunisian cinema to be too complicated, elitist and not up to the expectations of the people. What can be noticed in this production leap was the topic of isolation and suffocation that appears almost in all short films, and the focus on the big questions faced by people: failure, death, defeat or escape. Against this background, many directors worked on the idea of frustration as a violent and inevitable result of an oppressive regime. The topic of isolation was also echoed in the metaphoric scripts of the shorts. Metaphoric writing marked many of the films. Their directors used different creative techniques and tools in order to affirm the meaning of living that persists even in a society stifled by a despotic regime. Who is Walid Tayaa? “I grew up with the Film clubs and especially with the Amateur Film Makers movement. Cinema is my means of expression of seeing and conceiving the World, of speaking, of being, of existing." Walid Tayaa: Tunis 1976, director, writer, trainer. Studied Social Sciences. Member of the Amateur Film Makers Federation since 2002. Made his first short movie "South South" (2002), in 2006: "Madame Bahja", in 2008: "Prestige". In 2009 the documentary "The Passionates". He is currently working on his first feature movie "Fataria" and his first novel. Walid Tayaa's films were selected by many festivals during these years, and were rewarded in many occasions. They were aired on many TV channels. Unica Warsaw 2002, Cannes 2006, Berlin Film Festival 2010, Best Short Movie award Tetouan Mediterranean Film 2010, Festival 20 Carthage Film Festival 2010 Golden Tanit award, Dakar 2010, Dubai film Art 2010, Maghreb des Films 2011, Festival of Arab Film of St. Jaques de Compostella Spain 2012.