The Culturist Film Club: Terra Femme
Film still: Terra Femme (Director: Courtney Stephens, 2021, USA, 62 min)
After a summer break, The Culturist Film Club returns on Saturday, November 9 at Kutubna Cultural Center, an independent bookstore and culture center, located in Nadd Al Hamar in a Dubai.
I will present a film about home movies and travelogues made by women, and will do something a bit different compared to the previous events. The post screening film discussion will also include a reading and a talk about a book about travel writing by women. I’ve partnered with Tamreez Inam, a writer, literary consultant and curator who will join me for this discussion.
Read all the details below. I´ve been wanting to pair the film and book for a while, and I´m happy Tamreez agreed to do this with me, and thankful to Kutubna´s Founder and Director Shatha Almutawa for offering us the space to host this event. If in Dubai, please join us.
Widely Travelled Women, Home Movies and Travelogues
Film screening and discussion presented by The Culturist Film Club and Tamreez Inam
Date: Saturday, November 9, 2024 at 6.30pm
Venue: Kutubna Cultural Center, Madina Avenues, Nadd Al Hamar, Dubai (location map). Free parking is available.
Ticket: AED 60. Buy online here.
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.
Terra Femme
Director: Courtney Stephens
2021, USA, English, 62 min, PG-15
Terra Femme is an essay film comprised 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.
About Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women:
“When thinking of intrepid travelers from past centuries, we don't usually put Muslim women at the top of the list. And yet, the stunning firsthand accounts in this collection completely upend preconceived notions of who was exploring the world.
Editors Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz, and Sunil Sharma recover, translate, annotate, and provide historical and cultural context for the 17th- to 20th-century writings of Muslim women travelers in ten different languages. Queens and captives, pilgrims and provocateurs, these women are diverse. Their connection to Islam is wide-ranging as well, from the devout to those who distanced themselves from religion. What unites these adventurers is a concern for other women they encounter, their willingness to record their experiences, and the constant thoughts they cast homeward even as they traveled a world that was not always prepared to welcome them.
Perfect for readers interested in gender, Islam, travel writing, and global history, Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women provides invaluable insight into how these daring women experienced the world—in their own voices.”
https://iupress.org/9780253062390/three-centuries-of-travel-writing-by-muslim-women/
Biographies:
Courtney Stephens is a writer and a filmmaker whose non-fiction and experimental films explore the contours of language, historical geography, and women’s lives. Her work is exhibited internationally; venues have included MoMA, National Gallery of Art, The Barbican Centre, and film festivals including the Berlinale, New York Film Festival, South by Southwest, IDFA. She was a Fulbright Scholar to India and one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. A graduate of the American Film Institute, she co-founded the Los Angeles microcinema Veggie Cloud and has curated film programs for The Getty, Museum of the Moving Image, Union Docs, and Flaherty NYC.
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.
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; Moving Image Editor at Tribe, a non-profit publication and platform that focuses on photography and moving image from the Arab World.