Filmmakers in Focus: Izza Génini in Conversation
Date and time: Tuesday, October 6, 2020, 8 to 9:30 pm British Summer Time (UTC+1)
Register here.
Filmmakers in Focus: Izza Génini in conversation
Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival presents a free, nonticketed, livestreamed conversation from the Filmmakers in Focus series.
A pioneering filmmaker in Moroccan cinema, Izza Génini presents four films as part of our Filmmaker in Focus program. For this special event she will be joined in conversation by writer and curator Omar Berrada and filmmaker and writer Yasmine Benabdallah with 2020 programming fellow Myriam Mouflih.
Discover Izza’s films at the festival here.
The conversation will be streaming live from our Facebook Page, our website and twitch channel.
Izza Génini (1942, Casablanca) is a film director and producer based in Paris. Before turning to cinema, Génini studied Literature and Foreign Languages at the Sorbonne and at the School of Eastern Studies in Paris. She is a pioneering figure in Moroccan documentary and founded the distribution company SOGEVAL, producing and distributing Moroccan and African cinema. Her influential films grapple with themes such as her Moroccan-Jewish heritage, diasporic identity and the wide variety of socio-cultural contexts of music in Morocco.
Yasmine Benabdallah is a filmmaker and writer born and raised in Morocco. She studied Film and Mathematics at Columbia University for four years before moving to Paris to attend the Experimental Programme in Political Arts at Sciences Po (SPEAP). Through filmmaking, visual art, and writing, she explores stories around memory, identity, dance, heritage, diaspora, borders, archive, and rituals. Her films and installations have been shown in France, Egypt, the US, and Palestine, and she has participated as artist-in-residence in Morocco, France, Palestine and Tunisia. In 2016, she directed her first film, The Travel Curiosity, based on her father’s love for traveling. Other works include the short film Observational (2018) which explores images of surveillance; Ojalá: la vuelta al origen (2019), a feature documentary on the dance of the Palestinian diaspora of Santiago, Chile, and Its people, its sky, its scent (in production), a video installation on finding Chile in Palestine. She is currently working on Moussem Trans(e), a documentary on a Moroccan pilgrimage between religion, sorcery, and trans identities, as well as Chebba, a hybrid short about a Moroccan family and a protective ritual.
Omar Berrada is a writer and curator, and the director of Dar al-Ma’mûn, a library and artists residency in Marrakech. Previously, he organized public programs at Centre Pompidou, hosted shows on French national radio, ran Tangier’s International Book Salon, and co-directed Dubai’s Global Art Forum. He recently edited The Africans, a book on migration and racial politics in Morocco, and curated ‘Black Hands’, a solo show of M’barek Bouhchichi’s work at Kulte Gallery in Rabat. In 2016 he curated exhibitions at the Marrakech Biennale and at Witte de With in Rotterdam, centering on the work and archive of writer and filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani, whose posthumous history of Moroccan cinema he is currently editing. In 2017 Omar was the guest curator of the Abraaj Group Art Prize and a co-editor of Sharjah Biennial’s web journal tamawuj.org. He curated the 2018 editions of the 1-54 Forum, in New York and Marrakech. Currently living in New York, he teaches at The Cooper Union where he co-organizes the IDS Lecture Series.
