Gabès Cinema Fen: Stuttgart

A Selection of Tunisian Film Productions from the Gabès Film Festival
September 18 to 20, 2020

With films and videos from
Ismail Bahri, Nicène Kossentini, Souad Mani, Amine Koudhai, Alaeddin Abou Taleb, Malek Gnaoui, Haythem Zakaria, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Younes Ben Slimane, Fakhri El Ghezal, Hedi Ladjimi, Fakhri El Ghezal, Rabeb M’barki, Erige Sehiri, JIlani Saâdi

With lectures and talks from (online / onsite)
Paul Ardenne, Fatma Cherif, Iris Dressler, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Fatma Kilani, Stephan Köperl, Rabeb Mbarki, Negar Tahsili, Sylvia Winkler

Curator
Negar Tahsili

Within the framework of the program Kultursommer 2020, the Württembergischer Kunstverein will be presenting, from September 18 to 20, 2020, a selection from the 2019 and 2020 editions of the Gabès Cinema Fen Film Festival. The festival has been taking place in Gabès, Tunisia, since 2018. It was founded by Fatma Kilani, professor at IHEC Carthage (Tunis), and the artist Malek Gnaoui as a forum for films from the Arab world. Artistic directors since 2019 are the filmmakers Fatma Cherif and Sami Tlili. The video program within the framework of the festival is named after a bunker from the Second World War in Gabès, Al Kazma. It was conceived in 2019 by the artist Amel Ben Attia and in 2020 by the art critic Paul Ardenne. In April 2020, the festival could only take place online due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The selected program for the Württembergischer Kunstverein was curated by the artist and filmmaker Negar Tahsili. Little known in Germany, the focus is on art films by Tunisian directors. The screenings comprise short and long films from the fields of documentary, feature film, video, and animation. They are accompanied by a series of lectures and discussions (online and onsite) with directors and artists from Tunisia and Germany.

The evening programs starting at 9 p.m. will take place outside (sculpture courtyard). A detailed program will soon be published on the website and via the newsletter of the Württembergischer Kunstverein.

In her work as a filmmaker and artist, Negar Tahsili deals with the displacement and changing of contexts. For example, she transferred the Tehran Peace Museum to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne by means of an audiovisual tour. The visitors in Cologne were guided through a museum that is in fact thousands of kilometers away. Following this principle of displacement, Negar Tahsili now transfers the Cinema Fen from Gabès to Stuttgart, thus creating a dialogue and hybridization between the cultures. “Gabès,” says Tahsili, “is an interesting city with 130,984 inhabitants, in southeast Tunisia. The Gabès Cinema Fen is a great gathering of storytellers and a festival of visual arts and movies . . . I decided to copy and paste this festival, located in a city with ecological problems, to the Württembergischer Kunstverein, an art center in Stuttgart which is itself dealing with environmental issues. For making the unfamiliar familiar, I adopted the program and used curating as a medium for my ‘pick and replace’ project.”

All movies
Arabic with English subtitles

Dates
Friday, September 18, 2020, 7 pm – ca. 11 pm
(from 9 pm on: outdoor screening)
Saturday, September 19, 2020, 2 pm – ca. 11 pm
(from 9 pm on: outdoor screening)
Sunday, September 20, 2020, 11 am – ca. 3 pm

Registration at
inforemove-this@remove-thiswkv-stuttgart.de

Detailed program
soon at
https://www.wkv-stuttgart.de/newsletter

Entrance
Free