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ReFocus: The International Directors Series

ReFocus: The Films of Annemarie Jacir

By Iqra Shagufta Cheema and Stefanie Van de Peer

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£95.00

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About this book

Winner of the MeCCSA Monograph of the Year Award 2024

Takes a transnational, feminist approach to the oeuvre of Palestinian director, Annemarie Jacir

  • An entirely different approach to Palestinian film culture, in that the focus on a singular woman filmmaker who works internationally informs our insights into the contemporary Arab world
  • Rejection of the typical Western view that Arab cinema is a cinema of male auteurs, and instead offer a concrete description of a strong Arab woman filmmaker’s career
  • Interlace Jacir’s contemporary poetic/written, her filmic/visual and her critical/curatorial work with historical and political theory.
  • Focused critical analysis of the visual representation of Palestine in the global perception of place
  • Opens new vistas of discovery and interest into Palestinian film culture and its persistent focus on space and land. With this book, we root our work in the geospatial reality of Palestinian film culture and move towards a deeper understanding of transnationalism, refugeeship, and the power of a global identity
  • Draws attention to Palestinian women directors and their contribution, which often gets lost in the geopolitics

Palestinian film culture is unique due to its geopolitical circumstances, including continued colonialism and occupation, and the refugeeship of its citizens. The scholarship on the politics of film and its role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – including activist work, international solidarity films, and work on Palestinian documentaries – is usually defined by historical overviews of geopolitical events and developments. In contrast, this book offers an auteur-focused study of a global artist influenced by but not limited to the political discourse surrounding the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Jacir is a Palestinian woman whose work is recognised globally as innovative, politically challenging, and genre-crossing. The book offers an in-depth study of her films and other works by locating it in a geospatial, sociocultural, and critical theoretical framework. It critically analyses Annemarie Jacir’s development as an artist, filmmaker, and curator of film.

Reviews

Cheema and Van de Peer expertly illuminate Annemarie Jacir’s engagement with the complexity of the Palestinian experience as it traverses questions of memory, space and the transnational. The book pays homage to Jacir’s cinematic contribution as film editor, writer, producer and facilitator and perceptively traces the struggles and pleasures involved in the creation of a committed and aesthetically ambitious Palestinian cinema.
This is a well-documented study which offers an intimate vision of the evolution of Jacir’s film oeuvre, and how Palestinian cinema and audio-visual practices can become acts of resistance exposing the incongruous cultural memories of diverse Palestinian generations and their struggles for the homeland, freedom, and transnational identity in exile.
Table of contents

Preface: Annemarie Jacir’s Transnational Oeuvre - Iqra Shagufta Cheema

1. Experimenting with Realities in Jacir’s Short Films - Stefanie Van de Peer

2. Heterotopias and Thirdspaces: Construction of Space in Jacir’s Films - Iqra Shagufta Cheema

3. Locations of Memory: Home and Homeland - Iqra Shagufta Cheema

4. Transvergent Transnationalism: Borders, Homes, and Humans - Iqra Shagufta Cheema

5. Characters at the Margins or Minor Characters - Iqra Shagufta Cheema

6. Curatorial Politics and Practices - Stefanie Van de Peer

7. An Interview with Annemarie Jacir

Index

About the contributors

Iqra Shagufta Cheema

Iqra Shagufta Cheema is an Assistant Professor in Humanities at Graceland University, Iowa.

Stefanie Van de Peer

Stefanie Van de Peer is Reader in Film & Media at Queen Margaret University. She has published Negotiating Dissidence (EUP 2017), Women in African Cinema (Routledge 2020) and ReFocus: The Films of Annemarie Jacir (EUP 2023). She has also edited several edited collections on diverse topics including Jocelyne Saab’s work, Arab Stardom and Global Feminist Film Archives. She sits on the Executive Committee of the British Association of Film, TV and Screen Studies, is series editor for EUP’s ReFocus: The International Directors series, and is associate editor for the journal Studies in World Cinema.

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