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Widely Travelled Women, Home Movies, and Travelogues
Widely Travelled Women, Home Movies, and Travelogues
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Film Screening and Discussion Presented by The Culturist Film Club and Tamreez Inam
Date: Saturday, November 9
Time: 6:30 pm
Registration fee: 60 AED
Film: Terra Femme (USA, 2021)
Director: Courtney Stephens
Duration: 62 min
Terra Femme is an essay film composed of amateur travelogues filmed by women in the 1920s-1950s. With a score by Sarah Davachi, the film weaves between geographical essay, personal inquiry, and historical speculation, examining these films as both private documents and accidental ethnographies. The films present a new type of traveler: no longer a male seeker of conquests, she might be a divorcee on a tour of biblical gardens, or a widow on a cruise to the North Pole.
Representing the world through women’s eyes, the films raise questions about female representation in the archive, the role of amateurism in early non-fiction filmmaking, and the politics of the Western gaze. At once a film about longing for past worlds through cinematic excavation, this force flows in both directions as women from the past search for self-making in the act of looking.
The screening will be followed by a discussion between Hind Mezaina and Tamreez Inam about the film and the book Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women featuring a collection of translated travel writings from the 17th to 20th century by Muslim women as they travelled for religious pilgrimage, political reasons, education, and for leisure.
Time: 6:30 pm
Registration fee: 60 AED
Film: Terra Femme (USA, 2021)
Director: Courtney Stephens
Duration: 62 min
Terra Femme is an essay film composed of amateur travelogues filmed by women in the 1920s-1950s. With a score by Sarah Davachi, the film weaves between geographical essay, personal inquiry, and historical speculation, examining these films as both private documents and accidental ethnographies. The films present a new type of traveler: no longer a male seeker of conquests, she might be a divorcee on a tour of biblical gardens, or a widow on a cruise to the North Pole.
Representing the world through women’s eyes, the films raise questions about female representation in the archive, the role of amateurism in early non-fiction filmmaking, and the politics of the Western gaze. At once a film about longing for past worlds through cinematic excavation, this force flows in both directions as women from the past search for self-making in the act of looking.
The screening will be followed by a discussion between Hind Mezaina and Tamreez Inam about the film and the book Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women featuring a collection of translated travel writings from the 17th to 20th century by Muslim women as they travelled for religious pilgrimage, political reasons, education, and for leisure.
A limited number of free tickets are available for those who are unable to buy one. If you are interested, please contact info@kutubna.ae.
Hind Mezaina is an artist, film curator, and writer from Dubai. Her interests lie in cinema, cities, visual culture, collective memory, pop culture in the Gulf region, and archives. She is also the founder of The Culturist blog and The Culturist Film Club, and moving image editor at Tribe, a non-profit publication and platform that focuses on photography and moving images from the Arab World.
Tamreez Inam is a writer, literary consultant, and curator. She is the former Assistant Festival Director and Head of Programming for the Emirates Literature Foundation, where she was responsible for the curation and delivery of the Emirates Litfest, the Arab world's largest literary festival, as well as the programming for other Foundation initiatives such as the Connecting Minds Book Club in partnership with Expo City Dubai.
Tamreez Inam is a writer, literary consultant, and curator. She is the former Assistant Festival Director and Head of Programming for the Emirates Literature Foundation, where she was responsible for the curation and delivery of the Emirates Litfest, the Arab world's largest literary festival, as well as the programming for other Foundation initiatives such as the Connecting Minds Book Club in partnership with Expo City Dubai.
