by: Markéta Jakešová
Introduction
Cryptofiction, founded by Mania Akbari, with the curator Giovanni Vimercati, presents a selection of nine diverse films, all created by women directors with a Middle Eastern background that address issues related to Palestine and other Arab countries. Most of them also explore the roles and perspectives of women living Middle Eastern realities. Before turning to each film separately, I want to highlight the overarching framework that goes beyond the creators’ identities: all the movies challenge mainstream assumptions of what a supposedly universal Middle Eastern woman wants. Hence, in a way, the framework consists in the fact that there is none.
The mainstream Western approach towards women with a Middle Eastern background can be best described by Sara R. Farris’s (e.g. 2017) term femonationalism. It signifies the recent trend of nationalist ideology misusing selected feminist topics for its own agenda, namely xenophobia and anti-immigration politics. Seen through the lens of femonationalism, non-Western women in general, and Middle Eastern women in particular, are victims of the patriarchy of their own cultures and in need of liberation from the outside, that is, from Western culture and states. Should a Middle Eastern woman have a different opinion on this, it is supposedly because she has been brainwashed by her father, husband, brothers, and the entire non-European (most often Islamic) patriarchal system. Under the guise of “saving Arab women,” European and North American governments have free rein to incite hatred against Middle Eastern countries and—especially male—immigrants. Moreover, it allows Western societies to turn a blind eye to any patriarchal violence happening within them, or even fueled by their own cultural systems. Middle Eastern women are deprived of autonomous agency: they are either submissive victims, or they are welcomed by their white sisters only if they fully embrace the Western version of freedom. That often entails abandoning their own cultures, religions, and communities. Emancipation is encouraged, but only within narrowly defined boundaries.
Markéta Jakešová
Nevertheless, in this world of black-and-white vision, there is another danger lurking from the so-called progressive camp: many people of Western descent, who are quite reasonably opposed to Western imperialism, tend to romanticize non-Western societies and sometimes even look down on people of non-Western descent who view their own cultures critically and try to fulfill their dreams in a Western context. This is manifested, for example, in the Iranians’ complicated relationship with the Palestinian cause, even if they consider themselves allies.
All these ambiguities find expression in the carefully curated film selection An Arab Woman’s Place is in the Struggle: the main line running through the entire collection is that an “Arab woman” is an active participant and agent in art, society, culture, and politics, and she cannot be subsumed under clichés, whether coming from the West or from her own culture.
Annemarie Jacir: An Explanation: And Then Burn the Ashes (2006)
The Ivy League universities have traditionally been centers of student protests, but they are also at the core of North American political, economic, and cultural hegemony. The short film An Explanation: And Then Burn the Ashes by Annemarie Jacir (2006), an acclaimed Palestinian filmmaker, writer, curator, and producer, highlights the emptiness and hatred that an institution as prestigious as Columbia University can represent.
Set to the tones of Middle Eastern music by Kamran Rastegar, the film presents viewers with static, rather unappealing images of the university campus: untidy corners, windowsills, chains, iron bars, and a policeman walking away from the camera. All the while, a voiceover reads real messages received by Arab professors. These messages do not shy away from threats, swearing, and racist, xenophobic slurs. They were often provoked by the professors’ critiques of the politics and ideologies of the State of Israel and the USA, but having an Arab-sounding name or Palestinian origin seemed to be a sufficient reason for the attacks: “You are all a bunch of gangster murderers, robbers, looters, killers. That’s what Islam is all about. And everybody knows this. Ok? You are a bunch of bastards,” the last message reverberates against the backdrop of unsightly, bare stairs. The closing shots alternate between uniform-looking windows and pompous neoclassical pillars and archways with pieces of Latin inscriptions—empty spaces devoid of meaning.
Arab Loutfi: Tell Your Tale, Little Bird (2007)
In her book A Decolonial Feminism, French political scientist and activist Françoise Vergès (2019; 2021) emphasizes the importance of preserving the true memory of past feminist, antiracist, anticolonial, and anti-imperialist struggles. Even if many battles ended in defeat, it is essential to recognize the continuity and affinity with today’s fights and insist that the struggle continues. The way we typically hear about emancipatory activism and its actors is through stories of individuals that erase or marginalize the collective efforts, which are, in fact, often the main drivers of these movements. Female activists of color—if they are remembered at all—are either reduced to wives and pacifists or denounced as terrorists.
Arab Loutfi’s documentary Tell Your Tale, Little Bird (2007), filmed in 1993, presents the testimonies of seven Palestinian female fighters, reflecting on their active years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The film is a 90-minute compilation drawn from 35 hours of interviews, organized around various subjects related to anti-imperialist struggles. While it showcases seven extraordinary individuals behind remarkable acts of resistance, such as successfully hijacking a plane without any casualties, themes of cooperation and solidarity—especially international solidarity—constantly resurface. For example, Leila Khaled, perhaps the most well-known of the seven women, opens the film by recalling her participation in various demonstrations, including those in support of Algeria and in protest of the murder of Patrice Lumumba. In other parts, the women speak of solidarity during imprisonment, explaining how the activists educated and supported one another, always holding onto hope—for their own release and the success of their missions, even if it were supposed to happen without their active contribution.
What these women endured in Israeli prisons is unimaginable, and, as they themselves pointed out, not much different from the conditions in Nazi concentration camps, including the use of poisonous gas as punishment for striking. Leila Khaled mentioned that she was fortunate to be sent to a British prison instead of an Israeli one. While many memories of guerrilla warfare reveal a near-gender equality, it was in prison where double oppression manifested, through sexual violence and the shame associated with it. Rasmeah Odeh recalls that the first question her sister asked when visiting her in the hospital where she was being treated after all the torture, was whether she had been “dishonored.” The response was proud and clear: “My honor is my country, which I will never give up or sacrifice. It is all that we own in our lives.”
As someone fortunate enough never to have lived under an extremely oppressive regime, I find it difficult to view some of the women’s actions as heroic. However, fighting without proper resources against an occupying state backed by the world’s most powerful empire plays by different rules. Acts like bombing a supermarket full of civilians might thus seem ethically troubling from my privileged perspective, but they remain brave, albeit desperate, acts of an oppressed people that should not be forgotten.
Jocelyne Saab: Palestinian Women (1974)
Jocelyne Saab’s short documentary Palestinian Women (1974) well complements the previous film. Rather than focusing on individual fighters, it offers a broader and more complex perspective. The film opens with shots of children playing in a refugee camp, followed by a scene of women wearing keffiyehs in a combat situation. Other parts depict refugees, including children, fleeing their country after the Six-Day War in 1967. The women who speak on camera are Palestinian refugees who have managed to pursue their studies in Lebanon, some of whom voluntarily remain in refugee camps to assist their compatriots. A voiceover notes that most people believe in a political solution; however, as an example of those who don’t, the film presents a peasant woman with a rifle, lamenting the Israelis’ unfair advantage in terms of equipment and the support they receive from Western countries. The film concludes somewhat abruptly with the testimony of a young female fighter who describes being imprisoned four times and enduring physical torture and humiliation in Israeli prisons. Despite its brief runtime, the short film is well-balanced, presenting a range of perspectives and hopes that may have still seemed attainable 50 years ago.
Larissa Sansour: Nation Estate (2012)
The dystopian short Nation Estate (2012) by multimedia artist Larissa Sansour is the most narrative-driven film in the selection. It imagines Palestine as a skyscraper, with all its significant locations situated on individual floors, between which people “travel” by elevator. The audience follows a young woman returning to her bare, modernist home, passing through various security checks as she moves between floors. The film portrays the country as completely subordinate to a corporate system. Sansour employs a unique style, starting with close-up shots that prevent voyeurism, and incorporates effective CGI against a backdrop of immersive, psychedelic music with Middle Eastern motifs. The final shot reveals that the protagonist is pregnant—a spark of life and perhaps hope in an otherwise uniform, dystopian reality.
The film was disqualified from the Élysée Art Prize competition, sponsored by Lacoste, for allegedly not aligning with the competition’s spirit of joie de vivre, a decision widely criticized as political. Ironically, as noted by a few reviewers on the film cataloging site Letterboxd, Nation Estate depicts something Palestinians today could only dream of: a life without the omnipresent threat of death.
Selma Baccar: Fatma 75 (1975)
The semi-documentary Fatma 75 (1975) by Selma Baccar is the first feature-length film made by a Tunisian female director. By following Tunisian women’s historical struggle against oppression from foreign colonizing forces and the patriarchy of their own society, the film highlights both the universal struggles of Arab women and the specific challenges within the Tunisian context. Tunisia often prides itself on being a progressive Middle Eastern country; indeed, the film was created on the occasion of the International Women’s Year, receiving state funding and praising President Habib Bourguiba as a significant figure in the process of women’s emancipation. However, it did not fully conform to the official feminist ideology, which likely would have portrayed the president as the sole savior of women, presenting Tunisia as a paradise. Consequently, the film was banned in Tunisia for several decades.
Fatma 75 combines archival footage and acted segments featuring the director’s cousin, Jalila Baccar. She begins by portraying half-mythical, half-historical female heroes in a short prologue: Sofonisbe and Hasdrubal’s wife from the 3rd century BCE, Kahina from the 7th century CE, Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab’s slave Jalajil from the 8th century, and Aziza Othmana from the 17th century. All of these figures look directly into the camera as they introduce themselves, reminiscent of theatrical performances. The film then transitions to more recent times, spanning the 1930s to the 1970s, where the protagonist is named Fatma—a label that the colonial administration used to designate all Tunisian women. The contemporary Fatma reads a book by feminist scholar Tahar Haddad, who was ridiculed for his “extreme” views in the 1930s, as she seeks to fill in the gaps of the history of women’s emancipatory struggles. A connecting figure throughout the film is Bchira Ben Mrad, the founder and leader of the Muslim Union of Tunisian Women (UMFT) from 1936 to 1956, who is interviewed in the film. The final scenes depict Fatma giving a presentation in a classroom, reiterating a theme explored in other films of this series: that women’s emancipation is not a singular event or a gift from men in power; rather, it is an accumulation of acts of bravery and hard work by many individuals and collectives causing gradual changes within Tunisian society.
Mary Jirmanus Saba: A Labor Theory of Artistic Value (2024)
The latest film in the selection is the twenty-minute philosophical short A Labor Theory of Artistic Value (2024) by Mary Jirmanus Saba. It focuses on a young mother struggling to write a philosophical paper while caring for her baby and managing household chores. The woman cleans and then reads from Wages Against Housework by Silvia Federici, followed by Capital by Karl Marx. She is frequently distracted by her child, just as the film’s viewers are.
However, what initially appears to be yet another rant against the injustices of motherhood turns out more intriguing when it becomes clear that the problem is not that mothers, or women in general, lack the time to accomplish all the wonderful things that men have always been doing. Instead, the very notion of a (male) genius is flawed; it is directly dependent on the unpaid or low-paid work done by women, lovers, slaves, colonized people, immigrants, working class, and people of the Global South. The woman continues reading, she is sitting in front of her laptop: sometimes she uses a pen for gesticulation, sometimes it is a knife because she tries to cook at the same time. The space is confined and cluttered.
The ideal of genius must be abolished because, for most mothers, it is neither attainable nor desirable; achieving it would require them to completely alter their relationship with their children and outsource all caregiving. Instead, there is the possibility that “all the work of being a mother becomes artistic practice.” The fragmented manner in which the woman writes her essay in the film—much like the way Saba herself likely made the movie, and how we are compelled to watch it—is an artistic style. Viewing motherhood as an artistic practice and a political struggle is a stance that can transform our perspectives on art and its geniuses, which can ultimately lead to changes of our being. The closing credits roll to the sound of the Internationale and dutifully list Saba’s children as actors.
Mona Hatoum: So much I want to say (1983)
The less than five-minute short So Much I Want to Say (1983) by Mona Hatoum is the shortest film in the selection but perhaps the most disturbing one. It consists of a series of black-and-white still shots of a woman’s face in close-up, transitioning sequentially, with each frame descending from the top of the screen to create a “loading” effect. The woman’s mouth is gagged or covered in various ways by a pair of male hands, while a mechanical female voice repeats, “So much I want to say,” over and over.
The film is often interpreted in the context of the silencing of women and the violence perpetrated against them in patriarchal systems. While this is certainly a primary interpretation, it can also be seen as a tribute to all silenced voices, particularly those silenced multiple times, such as women of color and immigrant women.
Nahed Awwad: Going for a Ride? (2003)
Going for a Ride? (2003) by Berlin-based Palestinian director Nahed Awwad presents rather unusual victims of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: cars. In April 2002, during the Second Intifada (Al-Intifada Al-Aqsa), the Israeli army bulldozed roads, buildings, and vehicles. In the city of Ramallah alone, between 600 and 700 cars were destroyed. “Cars are supposed to symbolize freedom of movement; with them, you should be able to go wherever you want.” However, even when people had their cars, they couldn’t go anywhere because Palestine is effectively a prison.
Awwad was inspired by Palestinian artist Vera Tamari’s installation, which shows car corpses on a piece of road that leads from nowhere to nowhere and is also featured in the film. A heartbreaking scene depicts a taxi driver mourning his demolished car, which was his source of livelihood, along with photos and footage from the past of people going to their weddings in their cars and shots of small personal objects that are placed in the cars to feel at home. Everyone trying to live a normal life under abnormal circumstances.
Unlike other films, Going for a Ride? is not explicitly feminist, but through the ruins of inanimate objects, it manifests a deeply humanist pain for sacrificed human lives, wasted material, and killed dreams.
Nina Menkes: The Great Sadness of Zohara (1983)
The Great Sadness of Zohara (1983), the second film by Nina Menkes, is my personal favorite of the program, but it is also arguably the most elusive one. As the director described in several interviews, the film was created in close collaboration with her sister Tinka Menkes, who is the only cast member, and it was made on a virtually non-existent budget.
Menkes was inspired by Jungian psychology and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces to film a quest journey from a woman’s perspective. The main and only character, Zohara, is a young Jewish woman traveling from Jerusalem to the “Arab World” (representing the great Other) and back. In the first part, she wanders in her home and around Jerusalem, wearing a scarf typical of Orthodox Jewish women. She never speaks, but we hear a husky voiceover quoting and paraphrasing Job, possibly representing haunting thoughts in her mind. She packs her belongings, takes a train abroad, and, rather aimlessly, cuts her hair in a hotel before setting off into the city.
The scenery changes dramatically: there is lively music in the streets, and Zohara appears confused but somehow more attentive than she was in Jerusalem. Her clothing style shifts as well, evolving from conservative attire to colorful pants and a pink shirt, complete with a punk hairstyle. After walking through the streets, Zohara has an unspecified conflict with a man at the hotel, and it seems as though she is expelled from the city where she had been staying. She embarks on a ship and ends up in the desert, sleeping outside. After a bath in the river, Zohara returns to Jerusalem, now back in her Jewish clothing, but the audience can see that she has changed from the smirk she gives to the camera. In the final scenes, she is shopping, adjusting her scarf, and we see her walking away in the very same neighborhood, full of hanging laundry, the same place where the film began.
As Menkes has mentioned in interviews, she usually works very intuitively. The fact that there were no other actors besides her sister creates an interesting half-documentary effect, with passersby at times inadvertently glancing towards the camera. Menkes originally intended to create a variation on a male hero’s journey, showing her sister triumphant upon returning from the “Other” side, but none of the planned scenes “felt right.” At that point, the director realized that a woman’s journey is never truly triumphant—she always returns to her inferior status, which is precisely where Zohara concludes her story.
While intuitive during shooting, Menkes adds that her editing and post-processing work is on the contrary very conscious and intentional. This is particularly evident in her work with sound: she employs my favorite technique of combining ambient and added sound, including voiceovers that alternate between Biblical quotes, incomprehensible gasping, muffled stammering, moaning, disturbing chants, and modern classical music—sometimes all together. The sound design, editing, and Tinka Menkes’ acting make watching the film a truly extraordinary experience.
During the whole film, Zohara’s expression reveals a profound sense of alienation, a haunting reflection of the internal and external conflicts she faces. Despite her journey across diverse landscapes and cultures, she ultimately returns to the same space, cloaked once again in the garments of her upbringing. This cyclical return underscores the feeling of entrapment that many women experience, particularly non-white women, who navigate the complexities of identity within a patriarchal framework that often marginalizes their voices.
Conclusion
The films explored in this selection collectively highlight the multifaceted experiences of women in the Arab world and beyond, each offering a unique lens through which to examine themes of identity, struggle, resistance, and resilience.
Together, these films invite viewers to reflect on the enduring struggles of women across cultures and histories, revealing the common threads of alienation and resilience that bind their narratives. They challenge us to consider the intersections of gender, race, and class in shaping experiences of oppression, ultimately urging a reevaluation of the narratives surrounding female identity and agency. As we engage with these cinematic representations, we are reminded of the importance of amplifying diverse voices and recognizing the ongoing fight for recognition, autonomy, and cooperation in a world that continues to marginalize many.
Sources:
Awwad, Nahed, dir. 2003. Going for a Ride? https://vimeo.com/ondemand/arabwomen/1005583326.
Baccar, Selma, dir. 1975. Fatma 75. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/arabwomen/1007353064.
Hatoum, Mona, dir. 1983. So Much I Want to Say. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/arabwomen/986615793.
Menkes, Nina, dir. 1983. The Great Sadness of Zohara. https://vimeo.com/55685308.
Saab, Jocelyne, dir. 1974. Palestinian Women. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/arabwomen/986615355.
Sansour, Larissa, dir. 2012. Nation Estate. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/arabwomen/987833631.
Vergès, Françoise. 2019. Un féminisme décolonial. Paris: la Fabrique éditions.
———. 2021. A Decolonial Feminism. Translated by Ashley J. Bohrer. London: Pluto Press.
