Practical Workshop on Analysis and Critical Writing Focused on Tunisian Films from the 37th Edition of FIFAK
Participants will be invited to engage in discussions and analyses of the films and to practice writing through individual pieces developed during group sessions. By the end of the workshop, each participant will be required to produce a written work on a film or a topic related to the festival. These pieces will be published online in the workshop's journal.
This workshop is an initiative of the Échos association, supported by the Massari programme.

It all begins with an encounter, a memory; writing is a way of invoking a form of memory... And storytelling, beyond its classical conception, may be about extracting, abstracting, imagining.

Carine Doumit, Yosr Gasmi, and Mauro Mazzocchi invite us into a conversation about their writing and editing practices. Conversing is about invoking "exchange, intimacy, companionship." Perhaps these parameters are necessary to collectively reflect on the art of composing, imagining, and observing the details within this weaving that continually draws nourishment from life practices, as well as the challenges of the productive context to which the film is subject.

Carine Doumit invites us to follow together, for the duration of a conversation, this thread of Ariadne.

Drawing from film excerpts, Azza Chaabouni will engage in dialogue with filmmaker Lina Soualem about the multifaceted writing processes in her documentary creative approach. The discussion will illuminate the back-and-forth movement between various stages of writing: textual work, filming, and editing .This non-linear process weaves time between the present and images of the past, composed of familial and historical archives. 

Throughout this session, the filmmaker will reveal how she sought to reawaken the intimate memories of her loved ones to reclaim their/her story, undertaking the urgent task of addressing issues of colonial trauma, exile, and transmission through creative writing and the construction of imaginary territories. 

Through her films, she brings visibility to intimate memories that resonate with collective memories of a community, a people, invisibilized, uprooted, marginalized beings deprived of their identities, and constantly compelled to reinvent themselves in perpetual exile.

There is the tectonics of plates and there is that of films, both concerned with the terrestrial community - prior to any occupation, which is colonial appropriation. The tectonics thus require workers and carpenters (tektôn) to build temporary shelters of hospitality, just as the cinema does. They are the rhapsodes weaving the desired textile (the text) of a shared habitability - weavers akin to those in Gaza. On either side of a screen whose gauze is known to be torn. The images promise, contrary to punches and gunshots, friendly handshakes. This is called editing, our beautiful concern, and all re-edits rise from the ruins of endured time.

The Masterclass with Sofia Alaoui will bring together the Franco-Moroccan director with a film critic to explore the behind-the-scenes of the author's creative process. The event will shed light on the artistic and technical approach of the award-winning drama "Animalia," which won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival 2023.