IS THERE STILL A WORLD TO BE WON?

By Nour Ouayda

Graffiti near Martyr’s Square, Beirut, May 2021.
Inscription reads: “ Down with our paralysis, political imagination is resistance”

Around 50 people sat in a room on the eleventh floor of a building on Champollion Street in downtown Cairo. A diverse group of film programmers, distributors, cultural workers, film professionals, and researchers came together to discuss the practice and politics of film programming. Entitled Cinema of the Global South, a programmer’s meeting, the three-day event invited us to reflect on our positions working in and from the Global South. Speakers and participants alike were encouraged to think through the first Bandung conference, which took place in Indonesia in 1955, and revisit the legacy of the resulting Non-Aligned Movement today, especially since October 7th 2023.¹ What does international solidarity look like in times of mass extermination, ethnic cleansing and uncontrollable extractivism? How can curatorial film practices be thought of as ways to organize against the normalization and complicity with neoliberal and neocolonial world orders that enable and justify such mass butcheries and exploitation?

The world was very different at the time the first Bandung Conference was held. The Non-Aligned Movement sought to propose a way to organize outside of the US / USSR polarization. Since this mobilization coagulated around very specific decolonial and anti-imperial struggles, it was easier to politically and geographically define the different camps. Terms such as ‘developing’ or ‘third world’ countries were used to delimit the alternative to the bi-polar organization of the world. One of the first things discussed during the meeting was how these distinctions are much more difficult to clearly define today. The globalization and broad consumerism linked to multinational giants that define our era of late capitalism reappropriates any attempts to create other alternatives. These are very quickly reinvested into the system as another commodity to consume. We can sometimes see this in the development of identity politics that evolved from the struggle for civil rights into packageable brands that can serve Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) policies. For example, one of the conversations that took place on the second day of the meeting related to the use of defining terms such as Black, Arab, or Lebanese in film program titles. On one hand, this kind of terminology creates a sense of belonging to otherwise marginalized and invisibilized groups, and defines cinematic practices of certain territories or communities. One of the speakers expressed having to fight to include the term Black in a program title they were curating. Whereas the hosting institution was disinclined to use the term in the title, the curator saw it as a political action, an important way to define the cinematic practice of a certain community. For them, the institution’s reluctance indicated a desire to depoliticize the film program, becoming a way to contribute to the systematic erasure of these communities’ political and social struggles. On the other hand, such terms can also reduce the cinematic practices in a specific territory to dynamics of identity and belonging. I expressed, for example, our insistence to avoid the word Lebanese in the title of a program of experimental films from Lebanon I had co-curated a few years back. The program looked at how film and video works made in moments of transition after catastrophes do not only speak of the past but also anticipate what’s to come. Even though the program was exclusively made up of films made in Lebanon, it was important for us to present them through another angle, veering away from the nationalist framework. Avoiding the word Lebanese allowed us to present experimental film practices that were specific to the place they were made in, without exceptionalising that specificity.

Discussing the international solidarity networks that arose following the Bandung Conference in 1955 and the resulting organization of Afro-Asian Film Festivals in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, inevitably led us to examine some of the contradictions of that moment. How can we think of the non-aligned movement spearheading liberation struggles without considering how so many of the involved political leaders were in fact brutal dictators? I am not interested in the geopolitical or historical reasons for this, what interests me in this question is that it unsettles the assumption that the Global South is one coherent group, an idealized us united against them. In fact, every us contains a multitude of categories whose conditions of work and existence do not necessarily match – or even conflict. What are the ways of coming together without flattening the potential for multiplicity? When does the use of certain terms help congregate (creates an us), and when does it exclude (creates a them)? How can we define this us without it becoming a way to police others? How do we make sure to always take into account that it can be an unstable and changing category, as one of the speakers described it? A possible answer can be found in a reflection brought forth during one of the discussions around boycotting, framing it not as a moral or ethical act but as an organizational tactic. Maybe the way to approach certain terminologies is to consider them as tools to organize and not as ways to define a group or a geography.

Thinking through these tensions, the use of the term Global South, starting with the title of the event itself, can be seen as a way to think of the legacy of the Bandung moment today and not necessarily to pose a clear geographical definition. Indeed, the list of speakers covered territories ranging from Brazil to Indonesia, passing through Ghana, Tunisia, Egypt and Lebanon; places that would be easily associated with the Global South’s spatial delimitation. The event also included an intervention by one of the attendees who lives and works in Belgrade. He argued that looking through the North/South conception, Serbia would be geographically in the north. But Serbia also used to be part of Yugoslavia, a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. This unhinges the concept of Global South from its geographical boundaries. It allows us to conceive it as a deterritorialized political framework that can generate kinship between peoples and communities that recognize each other in a shared experience of oppression under global capitalism and cultural imperialism.

Today, movements of migration and exile further blur these boundaries. Many work and live in multiple territories or in diaspora, navigating between the supposed north and the south. Also, since the COVID pandemic, we have seen our activities move into virtual spaces. Of course, these dematerialized meeting territories do threaten to dilute the much-needed warmth of in-person interactions. But in times of increased border security and budget cuts in the cultural sector, the online sphere has enabled connection and exchange between people who might otherwise never have had the chance to meet. As one of the speakers beautifully put it: “We are more connected than we think – or we say – we are.” This simple affirmation came to remind us that as important as it is to be meeting in places like Cairo, outside of the European and North American capitals, it is also maybe vital to keep multiplying the ways and spaces in which we meet. I think that one way of doing so is to preserve meeting points beyond their capacity to produce or come up with specific outcomes. We are all working on projects and in institutions under the stress of deadlines and deliverables. We rarely have time to reflect on what we do without the pressure of having to produce a report. To some, the meeting in Cairo did not perhaps result in any concrete actions. To me, it was a vital space to meet and exchange outside of the imperatives of producing any coherent and immediate results.

Creating connection is one way to cultivate solidarity, especially in a world that enables and gives value to individualism and competition. I think that one of the most important things to come out of this meeting is that it gathered in one room different ways to practice the alternative. During one of the sessions, a moderator reflected on the name of the Network of Arab Alternative Screens (NAAS) asking: to which alternative does the "alternative" in the NAAS acronym refer to? Their question came as a result of a discussion on the necessity for certain arthouse cinemas to center festivals like Cannes, Venice, Locarno or Berlinale in the distribution and release strategies of independent films from the Arabic-speaking region. For these cinemas and distributors, the A-list festivals and arthouse theatre circuits are the alternative to the Hollywood/Bollywood distribution network. But in both cases, these are commercial markets, driven by audience attendance, profit margins, and accolades.

In places where cultural funding is scarce or non-existent, such structures occupy a complex position of being simultaneously an arthouse commercial cinema, a cultural institution and sometimes even a cinematheque. This burdens these structures with the weight of encompassing all the possible alternatives to the commercial multiplex. The freedom of curatorial choice becomes difficult in certain cases as these institutions become the only place certain films are shown. One of the effects of this is to reduce the alternative to a panorama of recently released or restored films. If these cinemas don’t show it, the audience might never get the chance to watch it. As we sat together in the room over three days, we realized that we come from and exist within different types of alternatives. For some, big festivals and release-based distribution allow them to build a “viable” market for independent films in their regions. For others, film cooperatives and artist-run collectives open spaces to experiment with different models of making, funding, programming and watching films. These different alternatives navigate networks that can sometimes seem worlds apart, making it infrequent for them to gather in the same room. In Cairo, we got together, and we were reminded that the center is not one, it is multiple, and so are the peripheries.

I would like to end this text by recalling two sentences that I noted down on the first day of the assembly. Both were formulated in an attempt to address the legacy of the Bandung Conference. On one hand, someone asked: “How do we find ways to congregate in the absence of a global left today?” On the other hand, another person suggested that looking back today on the conference and the Afro-Asian film festivals is a way “to reconnect to what might have been possible at that moment”, despite all the contradictions it carries. In an almost opposite motion, these two sentences signal a loss. They express the loss of a possibility to come together under alternative political structures, different from those that currently organize our world. This is what Mark Fisher describes as capitalist realism or “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but that it is now impossible to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”² Fisher refers to the famous quote by Frederic Jameson who wrote that “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”³ Well, if the end of the world is already happening, in Gaza, in Sudan, in Artsakh, in Congo then what other choice do we have than to burst open our imaginaries and embrace all incoherent possibilities?

Graffiti near Gemmayzeh, Beirut, March 2021.
Inscription reads: “Another end of the world is possible”

Nour Ouayda

Nour Ouayda is a filmmaker and film programmer. Her films experiment with various forms of fiction making in cinema. She is a member of The Camelia Committee with Carine Doumit and Mira Adoumier and part of the editorial committee of the Montreal-based online film journal Hors Champ. Between 2018 and 2023, she was the partnerships coordinator then deputy director at Metropolis Cinema Association in Beirut where she managed and developed the Cinematheque Beirut project. She also teaches film programming in Beirut

Footnotes

The short description of the event posted on Instagram stated: “To mark the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference, which took place in 1955 in Indonesia, we will revisit the legacy of Afro-Asian Film Festivals/The Non-aligned Movement and their reverberations across different cinematic geographies between past and present. Presenters will also highlight contemporary curatorial practices that aspire towards decolonization and reflect on the potentials and challenges of international cinematic solidarity, particularly since October 7th.” The post can be found here: https://www.instagram.com/p/DJhHKQYqWZ1/?igsh=cmVoc3g5N3VqNmkx
In Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism, Is there no alternative? Zero Books, 2008, p2.
In Jameson, Frederic. Future City. NLR 21, p76.