MUSLIMWOMENFILM · Locating the Storyteller: Muslim Women’s Auto/Biographical Cinema from the Islamic World

Locating the Storyteller: Muslim Women’s Auto/Biographical Cinema from the Islamic World

This project broke new ground as the first comprehensive study of Muslim women filmmakers’ first-person documentary and auto/biographical cinemas from the Muslim world. Filling for the first time a gaping lacuna in Film Studies, the project mapped Muslim women’s filmic depictions of their own condition and, through their personal experiences, of issues that broadly impact women’s lives across Muslim cultures, such as gender-specific marginalization, oppressive religious laws, and domestic violence. The study drew attention to the struggle of Muslim women filmmakers who face momentous constraints to assert their right to represent their own lives and feminist perspectives, and contributed new material and knowledge to the rapidly growing field of first-person expression in film, and of autobiographical studies more broadly. Much like their Western counterparts, Muslim women academics, historians, critics, feminists, journalists, and authors from the Islamic world have been instrumental in establishing a distinctly Muslim women’s/feminist identity. Taking on an oppositional and critical stance, they have done this through their context-oriented literature, life-writings and critiques of Islamic cultural constraints, Sharia laws and religious and cultural discrimination against women in their respective Muslim societies. They have questioned their own political, social and gender histories to redefine the sources of their particular oppressions in order to formulate strategies for emancipation and equal rights. Additionally, they have turned to the film medium to extend their creative and activist intent and representations from their particular socio-historical and contextual perspectives. Muslim women filmmakers are uniquely positioned within their societies to depict, examine and critique their respective personal and collective histories, experiences and subjugation under patriarchal oppression, religious fundamentalism and socio-cultural and political restrictions. However, research on Muslim women’s cinematic contribution to socio-cultural, religious, and political constraints regarding film production remain relatively limited from within the Muslim world itself. Research on Muslim women’s regional, historical, and culture-specific autobiographical cinemas even more so. This project aimed to fill this gap, thus significantly advancing beyond the state of the art in both Western and non-Western film studies. MUSLIMWOMENFILM has a strong gender-specific focus in that it brings to light the contribution and struggles of Muslim women filmmakers from a vast geographical area and different cultural perspectives, and attracts attention to the condition of Muslim women in local, national, and diasporic contexts.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз