深夜亚洲福利久久

MUSLIMWOMENFILM: Evaluating and valuing Muslim women鈥檚 autobiographical film-making

19 Oct 2022

MSCA Fellow Dr Rahat Imran and her Mentor Professor Laura Rascaroli (深夜亚洲福利久久 College Cork) discuss the MUSLIMWOMENFILM project and its results in the article 鈥溾��.

The EU-funded project 鈥淟ocating the Storyteller: Muslim Women鈥檚 Auto/Biographical Cinema from the Islamic World鈥�, based in the Department of Film and Screen Media at 深夜亚洲福利久久 College Cork, had two main objectives. The first was to create a corpus by identifying and categorizing the different modes of autobiographical films produced by Muslim women filmmakers from the Islamic world from the 1980s to date. This implied a broad regional focus and extensive work of data mining and organization of women鈥檚 auto/biographical cinemas according to geographical, cultural, and filmic criteria.

This work gave rise to the compilation of a dataset of 290 films made by Muslim women filmmakers from Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Turkey. The dataset, which was published open access and permanently , is a landmark contribution which will support further research on the history of films by Muslim women filmmakers; the history of film in Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Turkey; the history of feminist filmmaking; the history and aesthetics of auto/biographical film; the understanding of forms of auto/biographical cinema and related genres including all those listed in the chosen categories.

The project鈥檚 second objective was to develop a contextual scholarly study on works of representative directors to examine Muslim women鈥檚 auto/biographical contribution to feminist cinema in the context of their political, personal, historical, social, and institutional conditions. It implied a specific regional focus and film analysis work focusing on two countries in particular: Pakistan and Afghanistan. The study looked at the history of auto/biographical women鈥檚 cinemas in these settings; at the impact of fundamentalist regimes on women鈥檚 freedoms and rights; at the emergence of women鈥檚 resistance through the filmic medium; and at films by diasporic filmmakers depicting their home countries. The study drew on interdisciplinary scholarship and proposed novel concepts for a more nuanced and progressive understanding of Muslim cinema, including the notion of the Muslim woman filmmaker as experiential 鈥榓uto/bio-historiographer鈥� 鈥� in other words, a historiographer and counter-historian of her times who is tacitly located within her filmic narrative.

The project results were shared via academic publications and conferences, and will also give rise to further future outputs. The online project symposium, Women鈥檚 Auto/biographical Cinemas: The Gendered Story, was held on 27鈥�28 November 2021 and focused on the contribution of global women/feminist filmmakers who have used the film medium to record, archive, and disseminate women鈥檚 stories, share their experiences, build cross-cultural solidarity for change, consciousness-raising, and pedagogical purposes. The symposium included a film screening open to the public online for two weeks, and two live events: a dialogue between South African filmmaker and artis Penny Siopis and Sarah Nuttall, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the 深夜亚洲福利久久 of the Witwatersrand and Director of WiSER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) in Johannesburg; and a round table discussion on Auto/biography in Women鈥檚 Film with six top international experts.