As a child growing up in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), I vehemently resisted identifying with what seemed to be the arbitrary accident of my birth in, and subsequent belonging to, a country that seemed cut off from the rest of the world, even from time itself. Aspirations, such as those we were asked to describe in school essays, seemed so fantastical that the only thing to do in the face of their falsity was to fire away at them with grand platitudes. One might as well have aspired for “peace in Lebanon,” and so I did. However, when the so-called peace arrived, I must have missed it. One day, people around me were talking about the end of the war as something that had happened in the past, already three or four years ago, leaving me confused and suspicious. “Wait, what? When, exactly? Where was I? Why didn’t anybody wake me?” I had been experiencing that run-on time as business as usual, and part of my anxiety on hearing this “news” was due to the fact that I could not discern a difference between the former time and this new one, nor could I locate the threshold anywhere. Could I have been so indifferent, so uncaring towards my country, as to have missed such a momentous event?

The year I found out the war had been over for a while was also the year I went to the cinema for the first time. My father drove the family to the once-again (for the first time) accessible East Beirut, where movie theaters were once again (for the first time) playing the same films being shown in other movie theaters around the world. Despite intermittent attempts to revive them that continue even today, the cinemas of West Beirut never truly recovered. Those that were open at all were frequented exclusively by men, and mostly showed outdated American and Egyptian B movies, as well as porn, until they permanently closed a few years afterwards. The reopening of cinemas in one part of the country could have been a national performance held solely for my benefit—proof that the war had indeed ended, and a cue to start getting myself some real aspirations. Except that the cinemas of West Beirut held on to their seediness, ready to embrace my shadow of a doubt like friendly witnesses.

Under the auspices of an ever-eventful Arab world where unfinished business booms, this sixth dossier of Malaffat brings together contributions by the four 2025–2026 NAAS Research & Curatorial Fellows, Mahammad Hoogla-Kalfat, Omar Idtnaine, Amel Moyersoen, and Nour Ouayda. The volume highlights some of the research threads developed during their fellowship, running in parallel with programming and presentations that began last year and continue throughout 2026. Its four contributions gather stories, encounters, projects, and debts of an unsettled nature, projecting from an experience of cinema as site of communal reckoning and deferral.

When in the seventh century Arab invaders encountered the native Tamazight language of the Maghreb, they referred to it and its people as Berber, or foreigners. In 2011, meaning to contain the Arab Spring contagion starting to sweep Morocco, King Mohammed VI held a national referendum that passed a series of landmark constitutional reforms. Among them was the recognition of Tamazight as an official language and “the common heritage of all Moroccans without exception.” Fifteen years later, Omar Idtnaine reckons with this claim by taking Morocco’s first Amazigh film, produced in 1990, as a case study for a cinema relegated to ongoing cycles of state and institutional negligence and exclusion, from production to circulation to preservation–a status quo that risks betraying the heritage of all Moroccans, not to mention that of Morocco itself.

Amel Moyersoen retraces the diasporic cinematic landscape of 1970s Brussels, a meeting place for two distinct migrant groups: film students tasked with building a national cinema aligned with the agendas of their newly independent countries, and workers recruited in the construction of a new Belgian economy. Mapping this landscape as a symbiotic movement from and to the screen, Moyersoen posits films as repositories of a living story with multiple entry points and no end. Their narrative keeps unfolding in a chain of transmission that takes on new chapters with each new presentation, space, practice, or event.

Nour Ouayda invites eight guest contributors who translate to and/or from Arabic to reflect on encounters with complicity and conspiracy: films that were more interesting before their translations arrived, images of one reality translating another, an infantile state prolonged through malicious (mis)translation, an oratory register creeping unto banal conversations, wiretappers baffled by literally translated metaphors, an ambiguous preposition in a love song, words transplanted in foreign soil, and others that one never stops (not) translating.

Mahammad Hoogla-Kalfat tracks specters of communism that have haunted Egyptian cinema since its inception, from the first-ever fiction film that went missing to present-day documentaries that attempt to grapple with this repressed legacy, on which ostensibly incompatible mandates—religious, liberal, colonial, nationalist—all seem to have colluded. These communist “apparitions” often took on a negative form, in the shape of a denial, or a conspicuous omission in the course of adaptation from page to screen. Sometimes they appeared in the credits, in coded speech, or in an actor’s enactment of a scene all too similar to what they underwent in detention.

These days, as we scramble from one event to another before the former can become outdated, we risk not knowing where to begin the labor of deserving the world—if we are to heed the words of Jalal Toufic—or worse, never finding out what really matters to us in it. Through the perspectives gathered in this dossier, I hope the reader invested in the Arab or Arabic-speaking world can find at least one clue to why they care about it in the first place.