11 hours ago
The seventh Malaffat dossier, Unfinished Business, brings together the contributions of the four NAAS Research & Curatorial Fellows 2025-2026: Mahammad Hoogla-Kalfat, Omar Idtnaine, Amel Moyersoen and Nour Ouayda. Edited by Amal Issa, it is the written counterpart to the public programmes the fellows have developed since last year, ranging from an exhibition to film screenings and talks, and continuing throughout 2026.
In her introduction, Issa recalls growing up during the Lebanese Civil War and discovering, years after the fact, that it had ended without her noticing. It was the same year she went to the cinema for the first time. “Under the auspices of an ever-eventful Arab world where unfinished business booms,” the dossier gathers “stories, encounters, projects, and debts of an unsettled nature,” reaching from 1919 to 2026, and from Alexandria and Cairo to Brussels, Beirut and southern Morocco.
The four contributions are as varied in form as they are in subject.
In Aznazar Remembers: The Challenges of Documenting Amazigh Cinema in Morocco, Omar Idtnaine reads the eighteen Facebook posts in which actor Said Chahb recounted, during Ramadan 2026, the making of Tamghart Ourgh (A Woman of Gold), Morocco’s first Amazigh film, of which there is no trace in the archives of the Moroccan Cinematographic Center. Weaving in posters, VHS and VCD covers and photographs from Chahb’s personal archive, he asks whether posts and comments can form the nucleus of an alternative archive, and of a history written from below.
In Retracing Vidange perdue: Film, Struggle, and Diasporic Dwelling in 1970s Brussels, Amel Moyersoen starts from Malek Kellou’s 1974 student film on the demolition of Brussels’s Northern Quarter, and from her conversations with him, to map the film students, migrant workers, hunger strikes and cultural initiatives of the city’s diaspora. The piece takes the form of a collage mirroring her research map, with no set reading order: readers can enter from any point and click through. It is also available in French.
In Never Mind the Gap: Reflections on the Costs of Translation in Film and Elsewhere, Nour Ouayda extends her film programme on subtitles, Complicity and Conspiracy in Film Translation, to eight contributors who live between languages. They respond to the same three prompts, then to one another, in a constellation that can be navigated by contributor, thread or language.
In Egyptian Cinema and the Specters of Communism, Mahammad Hoogla-Kalfat tracks what Egyptian cinema erased, disguised or denied, from Mohamed Bayoumi’s Barsoum Looking for a Job (1923), the first Egyptian narrative film, lost for decades, to recent documentaries confronting a repressed legacy.
Rich in films, archives and references, the dossier shows how cinema culture carries the marks of its political moment, and how what official institutions neglect survives through informal memory: a Facebook page, a research map, a subtitle, a ghost in a film’s credits.
