Ali Essafi. Halaqat

Описание: In recent years, Essafi has been conducting research into North African film and visual archives, which has been transformed into several works. For this seminar, Essafi presents his project Halaqat, which is a video installation based on research around the destiny and practice of three radical North African filmmakers—Azzedine Meddour, Ahmed Bennys, and Ahmed Bouanani—whose films he restored and resurrected. Halaqat refers to the circle of people gathering around a storyteller in North Africa’s public squares. This traditional oral form inspired the region’s cinema at its origins, as well as other modern narrative genres, and encouraged interesting ways to work with archival footage to represent contemporary history. Sadly, these experiments were often censored or marginalized and forgotten.

Ali Essafi was born in Morocco in 1963. He studied psychology in France before entering the world of filmmaking. His works as a director include: General, Here We Are (1997); The Silence of the Beet Fields (1998); Ouarzazate Movie (2001); and Shikhat’s Blues (2004), which have been widely screened and praised on the international circuit. His latest production, Wanted, commissioned by the 10th Sharjah Art Biennial, has been selected for exhibition worldwide. He lives and works in Morocco and Brazil.