Features

It’s the second consecutive season in which the Cannes Film Festival has honored women and their struggles. This high mass of world cinema also seems to be intent on highlighting works lensed with the female gaze, even when they are produced by men.

Emna Mrabet is a lecturer in the cinema department of Paris 8 University, where her teaching focuses on the aesthetics of cinema, documentary production, and film analysis. The emphasis of her research is on the question of identity among filmmakers with a background of immigration from North Africa, particularly in the films of Tunisian female directors. Together with Ons Kammoun, professor and researcher in cinema in Tunis, she is currently organizing a conference in Tunis on June 13-14 on “Gender and emancipation in Arab cinema.”

Despite its popular and… anti-fascist origins, the high mass of international cinema which is the Cannes Film Festival has become utterly inaccessible. This is what around ten young women from the region confided to our journalist. On the other side of the barricades, these women from the Côte d'Azur struggle to find their place in their own city, faced with the people “from above”: the “others,” the movie stars, models, actresses, influencers. A Medfeminiswiya report.

Women and women’s resilience were at the forefront of the fourth edition of the Annaba Mediterranean Film Festival, which made a sensational comeback after several years of absence. A Medfeminiswiya report.

“There’s snow everywhere in Gaziantep, where I now live after being displaced from Syria. I look out the window and feel the warmth enveloping my body, and I feel grateful to have finally arrived somewhere warm and safe where I will live with my newborn and small family, where I can set off on a new life with friends my husband and I just spent a nice evening with.”

The storm that recently hit proved that Lebanon is unable to withstand a typical winter storm, and that the most vulnerable groups—people living in poverty, women, and refugees—are the ones who suffer from the deteriorating infrastructure and the absence of frameworks for social and economic welfare.

At least a third of the journalists killed in the Strip by Israeli bombardment met their deaths at home, in many cases with their families. In recent days, prominent members of the Israeli government have toughened their criminalisation of Gaza's reporters, assimilating them to Hamas.

About 29,000 people have been internally displaced from southern Lebanon and elsewhere in the country since early October as violence and hostilities escalate on the Lebanese border. And just as women and children in Gaza are paying the highest price in the ongoing war on the Strip, this reality also applies to Lebanon in light of the lack of adequate and equipped shelters to host the increasing numbers of displaced people. Added to this are the already-existing difficulties imposed by the dire economic crisis that began in late 2019.

On the steps of the Théâtre municipal in Tunis, one of the oldest historical monuments in the city and one of the most important strongholds for gatherings in support of just causes, Tunisian feminists came together carrying Palestinian flags and candles in symbolic solidarity with the martyred souls who fell in the occupation army’s bombing of Gaza. They gathered to affirm feminists’ and human rights activists’ commitment to fighting colonialism and supporting the resistance.

It is no longer surprising that women associate delivery rooms with feelings of terror and fear, not only in relation to the process of childbirth but the potential for humiliation, offense, and mistreatment. Many women, and Tunisian women in particular, have complained about suffering multiple violations at the hands of medical and paramedical personnel, including midwives. They are also subjected to various types of violence and discrimination on the basis of race, class, and age, not to mention coercive medical procedures.