5 months ago
On October 15th, 2020, Wekalet Behna (Egypt), NAAS's member in Alexandria hosted an online discussion between curators Ali Hussein Ali Al-Adawy and Yosra El-Mallah, filmmaker/ producer Mostafa Youssef, who runs terr.so, a NAAS affiliate, and writer/researcher/critic Nour El Safoury, who led NAAS's research publication Mapping Cinema Audiences: Egypt in 2018.
Mostafa Youssef, Nour el Safoury and Ali Hussein © SAVVY Contemporary
The event, organized in collaboration with SAVVY Contemporary, asked the question: How can we imagine a future relation between alternative/experimental aesthetics and variable audiences after the dominance of online platforms?
With the novel coronavirus, film production became slower and accidental and our online/digital/algorithmic presence became necessarily permanent and accelerated. Cinemas, arthouse cinemas, as well as art and culture centers with regular film programming are temporarily closed. Online film platforms that have already begun before Corona mushroomed rapidly and enormously during the quarantine.
On the one hand, commercial platforms such as Netflix and Shahid promoted a selection of restored and uncensored films by the prominent Egyptian filmmakers Youssef Chahine and Youssry Nasrallah, as well as streaming new series. On the other hand, alternative platforms such as Mubi and Aflamuna released a selection of contemporary and archival films. In other words, watching films became an essential part of the quarantine lifestyle, which raises pertinent questions about the prevalence of online platforms.
Watch the stream here.
The Rushes are programmed virtual conversations hosted by the UNITED SCREENS network and its affiliates, based in varied parts of the world and contexts. Curated by the individual host spaces, we invite film practitioners and technologists to reflect on and beyond the questions posed previously. Through these moderated virtual conversations we are hoping to learn from different contexts and practices of resistances, subversions, appropriations, cooperations, documentations, financing and accomplishments to integrate these learnings into working towards a decentralized cinema circulation ecosystem.
Between each Rushes, we would encourage the audience to send us feedback and questions that will be incorporated into the programming of the content as well. All of these learnings will be the prelude to the physical programme envisioned to bring these voices together in a physical space to forge in discussions, workshops, symposia, screenings over the course of 2021/2022 on how we can collectively shape reality.
UNITED SCREENS is a long-term research, networking, and exhibition project conceived by SAVVY Contemporary - The Laboratory of Form Ideas intending to create an alliance of community cinema programmers, both loving independent film and sharing realities of political and economic fragility.
Through this project, UNITED SCREENS aims to critically examine and reimagine technologies, methodologies, value metrics and network logics for community cinema to circulate alternative films and video art across the South. Drawing lessons from the combined spirit of the anti-neocolonial Third Cinema proposition of South America, film cooperatives of South Asia, avant-garde movements of Eastern Europe, as well as decolonial resistances of the African continent, UNITED SCREENS aspires to be a decentralized, peer-promoted think-well on film culture.
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