The Free

Arab Women-centered Films Breaking Taboos

Arab Women-centered Films Are Not Just About Women

By Barbara Nimri Aziz shared with thanks!….

Too often, we are overwhelmed with woeful tales, painful memoirs and worn analyses of Arab/Muslim women. Most depictions, whether we’re besieged in a war, or if we’re just trying to get by making small advances like women anywhere, we are invariably portrayed as hapless victims. We’re in need of succor, or reform, or rescue.

Writings by our own talented authors are popular if they reveal exploitations or despairs or escapes. These feed enlightened sisters abroad who may feel better about themselves when they can pity others.

Four women meet in Dar Joued (a women’s prison) on the eve of Independence day. From different ages and social conditions, they are condemned to live together under the authority and injustice of their jailer: Jaida. They share memories from the outside world, and also the joy, emotions and torment of their daily lives in Dar Jouad.
A film by Salma BACCAR

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Yellow fever: long live the revolutionary mob!

All sorts of people have jumped aboard, of all ages, and although they don’t necessarily speak a finely-honed ideological language, the mood is clearly anti-capitalist and anti-hierarchical.

This is an anti-capitalism which has been learned from real life, from being constantly trampled under the boot of exploitation, rather than from the pages of a left-wing textbook.

winter oak

D8paris2 Paris, Saturday December 8

What would an anti-capitalist revolution actually look like, if it happened?

That is the question that must be going through many an anarchist’s mind as current events unfold in France.

The Gilets Jaunes or Yellow Vest movement has staged four successive Saturdays of startling and energetic mass mobilisations across France against the neoliberal Macron regime, turning a protest against the cost of living into an attempted insurrection.

On Saturday December 8 there were more than a thousand arrests as crowds occupied central Paris and caused general havoc from Toulouse to Bordeaux, Nantes to Marseilles. The protests even spread to Brussels in Belgium.

D8paris5 Paris, Saturday December 8

d8brux3 Gilets Jaunes in Brussels on December 8

Another huge day of action is planned for Saturday December 15, which is being billed as Act V of the show, in which neoliberal President Macron finally resigns!

Meanwhile, France’s capitalists are complaining

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