BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//wp-events-plugin.com//7.2.3.1//EN TZID:America/Detroit X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/Detroit BEGIN:VEVENT UID:32259@arabamerica.com DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20240422T181500 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20240422T200000 DTSTAMP:20240219T161646Z URL:https://www.arabamerica.com/events/from-the-rural-to-the-stage-ahmed-e l-maanounis-morocco/ SUMMARY:From the Rural to the Stage: Ahmed El Maanouni's Morocco DESCRIPTION:[caption id="attachment_245134" align="alignnone" width="300"] Ahmed El Maanouni Profile Picture[/caption]\n\n \;\n\nNEW YORK\, NY\n\ n \;\n\nA writer\, director\, cinematographer\, and producer whose wor k includes some of the most emblematic titles of Moroccan cinema\, Ahmed E l Maanouni is the first Moroccan director to have caught international att ention\, with films such as Alyam Alyam (1978) and Trances (1981)\, the fi rst film Martin Scorsese selected for restoration in his World Cinema Proj ect. Praised for his ability to take a close\, perceptive\, and realistic look at everyday life in Moroccan culture and society with no traces of fo lklore and exoticism\, El Maanouni’s films\, shorts\, and documentary wo rks also include The Eyes of the Gulf (1984)\, The Moroccan Goumiers (1993 )\, Morocco-France: A Common History (2006)\, Burned Hearts(2007)\, Conver sation with Driss Chraibi (2008)\, and Fadma (2017).\n\nThe event will cen ter around the work of Ahmed El Maanouni in the context of Maghrebi cinema and culture and in relation to the inclusion of Trances in the Film Found ation’s World Cinema Project/The Criterion Collection. Attending the eve nt in person\, Ahmed El Maanouni and the speakers will share their insight s in discussing two of the director’s best-known works: Alyam Alyam—a film that captures the life of agricultural workers in the Moroccan countr yside narrating their desire to emigrate to Europe (which like Trances has been restored by the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project)—and Tran ces—a film whose interweaving of concert footage\, interviews\, and arch ival footage captures the excitement and the relevance of the music of the legendary Moroccan group Nass el Ghiwane.\n\nAbout the Speakers\n\nOmar B errada is a writer\, curator\, and translator whose work focuses on the po litics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He was the co-fo under in 2010 of Dar al-Ma’mûn\, an art and community center in Marrake ch\, where he established a free lending library\, hosted writers and arti sts in residence\, and spearheaded afterschool and literacy program. Berra da is the author of the poetry collection Clonan Hum (2020) and the editor and co-editor of several books\, including The Africans\, on race in Nort h Africa (2016)\; La Septième Porte\, a posthumous history of Moroccan ci nema by Ahmed Bouanani (2020)\; and Another Room to Live In: 15 Contempora ry Arab Poets (2023). He is currently working on a book project and collab orative performances that seek to examine and re-imagine racial dynamics i n North Africa beyond the persistence of anti-blackness.\n\nMadeleine Dobi e is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University . Her research areas include francophone/postcolonial literatures and cine mas of France\, the Maghreb\, the Middle East and the Caribbean as well as the cultural dimensions of migration and diaspora. She also teaches and w rites about eighteenth-century French culture\, particularly with regard t o orientalism\, colonialism and the history of slavery. Her publications i nclude: Trading Places. Colonization &\; Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (Cornell University Press\, 2010)\, and Foreign Bodies. Gen der\, Language &\; Culture in French Orientalism (Stanford University P ress\, 2001. Paper\, 2003). Her two current book projects are: After Viole nce: Society\, Politics and the Algerian New Wave explores Algerian litera ture\, film and sites of cultural production since 2000\, and Belated Memo ry: Revisiting Revolution at the End of Life\, a book concerning memoirs a bout the Algerian revolution written decades later by people in the later decades of life.\n\nAbby Lustgarten is a Senior Producer with the Criterio n Collection\, where she has prepared over 125 home video editions\, inclu ding the box sets The Apu Trilogy\, Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist\ ,Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema\, Dekalog\, The Signifyin’ Works of Marlon Ri ggs\, and four sets of the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project (one o f which includes Ahmed El Maanouni’s Trances)\, as well as single-editio n films by Spike Lee\, Martin Scorsese\, Charlie Chaplin\, Gina Prince-Byt hewood\, Krzysztof Kieślowski\, Seijun Suzuki\, Kirsten Johnson\, Jean-Pi erre Melville\, Akira Kurosawa\, Jean-Luc Godard\, Sofia Coppola\, Robert Altman\, Haskell Wexler\, Bing Liu\, and other directors from around the w orld. Before joining Criterion in 2002\, she spent ten years in independen t documentary production for both theatrical distribution and television b roadcast. She has also served on juries for the New York Foundation on the Arts.\n\nFlorence Martin is Dean John Blackford Professor of French Trans national Studies at Goucher College. She holds a Doctorate from Universit é de la Sorbonne\, Paris III\, and has published articles and book chapte rs internationally on the blues\, francophone literature and French and fr ancophone cinema. Her recent work focuses on postcolonial cinema\, the cin ema of the Maghreb (Morocco\, Algeria and Tunisia) and French and Francoph one women’s films. She is the author of Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Wome n’s Cinema (Bloomington &\; Indianapolis: Indiana U. Press\, 2011)\, and the co-author of Moroccan Cinema Uncut: Decentred Voices\, Transnation al Perspectives (Edinburgh University Press\, 2020). Her current book proj ect\, Farida Benlyazid and Moroccan Cinema (Palgrave MacMillan\, 2024)\, f ocuses on the work of Moroccan female director Farida Benlyazid.\n\nAbout the Moderator\n\nAlessandra Ciucci is Associate Professor of Music (Ethnom usiology) at Columbia University whose research interests include the musi c of Morocco. She is currently working on a book project titled Nass el Gh iwane and Moroccan Popular Music during the Years of Lead (1970s-1990s). ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://www.arabamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2 024/02/Ahmed-El-Maanouni-Profile-Picture-.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Detroit X-LIC-LOCATION:America/Detroit BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20240310T030000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR