Screening

Bouchra Khalili - Carte Blanche

Video installation

Bouchra Khalili’s transdisciplinary practice faces archival absence with a specific interest in suppressed histories and narratives. As she coins it when describing her exhibition at LUMA Arles, “How does film become an implusion for history telling?". In a direct response to that complex interrogation, her Carte Blanche proposes two cinematic sessions.

Traces and narratives focuses on the Movement of Arab Workers’ pioneering struggles, at the intersection of trade union struggles, performance and theater, and cinema, as well as its filmic and militant alliances with the Cinéluttes collective.

While the second session, Struggle in Fiction—around Les Ambassadeurs, highlights the singular approach of filmmaker Naceur Ktari’s Les Ambassadeurs, a groundbreaking first-hand account of the lives and struggles of North-African immigrant workers in the 1970s.

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The Movement of Arab Workers: traces and narratives

Saturday, February 17, from 2:30 p.m.

La Grève des ouvriers de Margoline by Jean-Pierre Thorn / Collectif Cinélutte
France | 1974 | 40 min.
Original soundtrack: French, Arabic (with French subtitles)

On 21 June 1973, a meeting of the far-right movement Ordre Nouveau took place at the Salle de la Mutualité, in Paris, under the slogan 'Halte à l’immigration sauvage' (Stop uncontrolled immigration). The demonstrators claimed to be expressing out loud what many people thought. Clashing with it, a counter-demonstration by extreme-left militants was harshly repressed by the police. The event was seen as proof of State racism and was the starting point for La Grève des ouvriers de Margoline. Produced by the CFDT, this documentary was one of the first to examine the situation of undocumented migrant workers in France, with the immigrant workers themselves speaking out for themselves.

Still from the film La Grève des ouvriers de Margoline

Struggle in fiction - around Les Ambassadeurs

Saturday, February 17, from 4:30 p.m.

Les Ambassadeurs by Naceur Ktari
France / Tunisia | 1976 | 102 min.
Original soundtrack: French

Driven by revolt following the racist murder of 15-year-old Djelali Ben Ali in 1971, Tunisian filmmaker Naceur Ktari (then a student in Paris) conducted a lengthy investigation among immigrant workers in the Goutte d'or district of Paris. The screenplay for Les Ambassadeurs was born of this documented research, and follows the daily scenes and intertwined destinies of several local residents as they face up to everyday racism. Whether at school, on the street, at the construction site, in the bistro, in the shops or in the apartment buildings, the words, gestures and looks of indifference are confronted by those of solidarity and anger. Ktari wanted to make a popular film that would encourage people to fight back.

Produced in 1975 by its director Naceur Ktari, the film won the Tanit d’or for best film at the 1976 Carthage Film Festival, the special jury prize at the Locarno International Film Festival, the same year, and was selected for the 1978 Cannes Film Festival in the category «Un Certain Regard»

A discussion with artist Bouchra Khalili and Christelle Rabier, lecturer at l’EHESS, Marseille, will follow the film screening.

Bouchra Khalili

Voir la page de l’artiste

Bouchra Khalili is a Moroccan-French artist. She graduated in Film & Media Studies at Sorbonne Nouvelle and Visual Arts at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy. Khalili’s work has been subject to many international solo exhibitions including recently at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2019); Museum Folkwang (2018); Jeu de Paume National Gallery, Paris (2018); Secession, Vienna (2018); Wexner Center for the Arts (2017); MoMa, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2016); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2015); MACBA, Barcelona (2015); PAMM, Miami (2014-2013), among others. Her work was also included in collective exhibitions and biennales, such as Documenta 14 and the Milano Triennale (2017); Telling Tales, MCA, Sydney (2016); The Future of History, Kunsthaus, Zurich (2015); Positions, Vanabbe Museum (2014); Here and Elsewhere, New Museum (2014); The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th Venice Biennale (2013); “Intense Proximity: La Triennale”, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012); and the 10th Sharjah Biennial (2011); among others.