ARTAFRICAOver the course of the week the Carthage Film Festival was estimated to attract
between one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand people. Unlike most
international film festivals, Carthage has a large local audience. This is mostly because
of the medium’s popularity amongst Tunisian youth and the festival’s rich cultural
history. Established by the late Taher Cheriaa (the founder of the Tunis Cinema
Club) in 1966, the Carthage Film Festival is the oldest of its kind in Africa and
was not always such a cosmopolitan event. The growth of the festival within the
international market is indicative of the new wave of interest in cultural production
from the region. That being said, it is rewarding to see that the festival has managed
to maintain its integrity for local audiences, for whom cinema has always functioned
as a site of resistance and a space for liberation. The role of cinema as such a site
was reinforced through this year’s numerous roundtable discussions, Master Classes
and talks programmes.In creating an open space for discussion, the festival offers an opportunity for African
and Arab cinema to maintain its specificity; to be viewed without the reductive lens of
Western hegemony. It is an opportunity to take control of how our stories enter and
maintain themselves within global rhetoric. The importance of this was made very
clear when, just three days after the official opening of the festival, an unidentifiedPAYING ATTENTION TO THE PERSON / STAFF WRITER: SC 2/20
Préféré Aziaka, still from The Painful, 2015. Duration: 13min. Editor: Marcelin Bossou. Sound:Canisius Avéko.
Image courtesy of the artist.