Spring 2008
Rasha Salti, Omar Amiralay
By Rasha Salti and Omar Amiralay Spring 2008 | ArteZine Rasha Salti interviews Omar Amiralay. How did the ciné-club begin? It was founded in 1952 by a man whose name was Dr. Haddad, if my memory serves me right, he was a French-language professor at the university. The Damascus Ciné-club was instituted to show films to catholic schools…
Omar Zelig
By Omar Zelig Spring 2008 | ArteZine Available here in French (PDF). One sure way of sounding like an old fart to younger generations of Algerians, is to keep reminiscing about the good old days when you could still go to the movies in Algiers, before the wide spread of video and satellite television in the…
Nigol Bezjian
By Nigol Bezjian Spring 2008 | ArteZine A long time ago the Syrian Baathist government nationalized cultural institutions, swiftly placing the iron noose around their necks. I must have been 14 years old when I woke up one morning to found the Cinema Orient (Cinema Al-Sharq) moniker covered with a white canvas that read, in red…
Daikha Dridi, Jean-Pierre Goux Pelletan
By Daikha Dridi and Jean-Pierre Goux Pelletan Spring 2008 | ArteZine Daikha Dridi interviews Jean-Pierre Goux Pelletan, a veteran film critic in Lebanon and one of the founding members of the Beirut Ciné-club. At 88 years and a few specs (“but don’t write down specs”, he prompted me laughing), Jean-Pierre Goux Pelletan tried to resurrect recollections of the years in…
Daikha Dridi, Abdallah Eyyaf
By Daikha Dridi and Abdallah Eyyaf Spring 2008 | ArteZine Daikha Dridi interviews Abdallah Eyyaf, filmmaker, founder of an itinerant ciné-club in Saudi Arabia. Abdallah el-Eyyaf, a mere thirty-years old, is a mechanical engineer at Aramco. He is also a filmmaker and soldiering on for the establishment of a ciné-club in Riyadhh. He, along with some forty fellow…
Daikha Dridi, Chafia Djemame
By Daikha Dridi and Chafia Djemame Spring 2008 | ArteZine Daikha Dridi interviews Chafia Djemame, founder of the Women’s Ciné-club in Constantine, Algeria. While barely in her thirties, when Chafia Djemame founded the Women’s Ciné-club with friends from Algerian universities, they were surrounded by young women so young they affectionately referred to her and group of friends as…
Winter 2007
Maymanah Farhat, Samia Halaby
By Samia Halaby and Maymanah Farhat Winter 2007 | ArteZine Q: How do you see the state of contemporary international art? How does art function in today’s global society? A: I think the word “art” is difficult because it covers so much. I prefer to discuss my own area of expertise, pictures. Pictures in numerous media serve mankind…
Jonathan Holt Shannon
By Jonathan Holt Shannon Winter 2007 | ArteZine With my research proposal in one hand and oud in the other, I felt that I was prepared for fieldwork in Syria. What I was not prepared for was a common response to my stated research interests in Arab music: Is there even such a thing as “Arab…
Hamdi Attia
By ArteEast Winter 2007 | Gallery ArteEast is pleased to kick off 2007 with an exhibition of recent digital media works by Hamdi Attia. The works featured here explore different aspects of the relationship between translation and political, social, and economic power. In video essays dealing with aspects of American culture ranging from movies and personal…
Abdellah Karroum, Hamdi Attia
By Abdellah Karroum Winter 2007 | Gallery The artist’s desire to understand his world and to represent it, to offer it as a living place, a place that is at once nowhere and completely unique, is a fundamental part of the artist’s project, of his way of being in the world. Hamdi Attia is a careful…
