MEDFILM FESTIVAL 2022: IL CINEMA DEL MEDITERRANEO A ROMA
Dal 3 al 13 novembre torna il MedFilm Festival, il più longevo festival di cinema della Capitale, il primo e unico evento cinematografico italiano dedicato alle cinematografie del Mediterraneo, che per dodici giorni guarderà, attraverso il Cinema, la letteratura, l’industry, ai temi cruciali dell’oggi.
“Mi trovo spesso a disagio con il sostantivo cultura…… Se penso alla ragione di ciò mi rendo conto che gran parte del disagio dovuto al sostantivo ha a che fare con il preconcetto che la cultura sia un qualche oggetto, una cosa o una sostanza, fisica o metafisica. Questa sostanziazione sembra riportare la cultura entro lo spazio discorsivo della razza, e cioè proprio entro quell’ idea per contrastare la quale era stata in origine concepita. Se implica una sostanza mentale, il sostantivo cultura privilegia di fatto quell’idea di condivisione, accordo e compiutezza che contrasta fortemente con quel che sappiamo sui dislivelli di conoscenza e sul prestigio differenziale degli stili di vita e distoglie l’attenzione dalle concezioni e dall’azione di coloro che sono emarginati e dominati. Se è invece vista come una sostanza fisica, la cultura comincia allora a puzzare di qualche varietà di biologismo, inclusa la razza, che abbiamo sicuramente superato come categorie scientifiche”.
Arjun Appadurai, Antropologo, Professore di Media, Culture and Communication alla New York University
Cos’è il laboratorio
(a cura di Laura Guazzone, Professoressa di Storia Contemporanea del mondo arabo; Ada Barbaro, Professoressa di Letteratura contemporanea del mondo arabo; Francesco Zappa, Professore di Islamistica)
L’obiettivo del laboratorio è stimolare e migliorare le capacità di riflessione e dibattito dei tirocinanti sulle opere viste durante l’esperienza come membri della Giuria Universitaria del MedFilm Festival in relazione ai temi affrontati nel tirocinio. Il laboratorio si è svolto in un incontro online che si è svolto dalle 10 alle 13 dell’11 febbraio 2022 sulla piattaforma Zoom. Il laboratorio è stato diviso in tre sezioni tematiche denominate “focus”.
FOCUS TEMATICI:
1. Cultura e identità nel Mediterraneo > Letture di Ugo Fabietti, Alessia Melcangi, Francesco Remotti, Marco Antonio Pirrone.
2. Cinema, letteratura e questioni di genere nel Mediterraneo > Letture di Veronica Flora, Aldo Nicosia, Marco Antonio Pirrone, Olga Solombrino.
3. Diritti umani e islam nel Mediterraneo > Letture di Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Marco Antonio Pirrone, Francesco Zappa.
Come si svolge il laboratorio
Ciascuno studente sarà “oratore” in uno dei tre focus, a sua scelta, e “commentatore” negli altri due. In ogni focus ciascun “oratore” ha illustrato al gruppo il proprio discorso attraverso il supporto di slides, il proprio personale percorso di collegamento culturale tra i temi del focus approfonditi nelle letture assegnate e le opere di cui è stato spettatore nel MedFilm Festival. Al termine di tutte le presentazioni di ciascun focus, i commentatori hanno espresso brevemente i propri commenti (di accordo o disaccordo) sulle presentazioni degli “oratori” e analizzato insieme in che modo i film o i documentari visti al MedFilm Festival hanno affrontato/interpretato gli argomenti dei focus nella prospettiva delle analisi delle letture proposte.
“(…) Cosa c’è dopo avere sostenuto (l’ho fatto nel libro L’ossessione identitaria del 2010) che l’identità è un mito, è un mito pernicioso, un mito di cui ci si può liberare? Cosa c’è al posto delle identità? Al posto delle identità sono affiorate le somiglianze. Non è che prima non ci fossero: semplicemente erano tenute nascoste dalle identità, dalla politica delle identità. Le identità tagliano via le somiglianze, le negano (i nazisti negavano qualunque somiglianza con gli ebrei, gli hutu con i tutsi e così via). Ma se ci si libera del pensiero identitario, le somiglianze — dotate di resilienza — riaffiorano. Ho dedicato un libro alle Somiglianze per rendermi conto che esse non sono soltanto in superficie: sono in profondità, perché coincidono con i legami che connettono le varie cose del mondo, compresi i “noi”, compresi i noi identitari. Riconoscere le somiglianze significa aprire una via per la convivenza. Il percorso è poi tutto ancora da compiere (…)”
(estratto da Intervista all’antropologo Francesco Remotti, professore emerito all’Università di Torino, a cura di Daniela Monti)
Professoressa Ada Barbaro, Studentesse e Studenti del tirocinio
«(…) L’universalità deve essere costruita attraverso l’idea di consenso progressivo. Per raggiungerlo è necessario tener conto delle relazioni di potere. Questo vale per ogni tipo di universalismo, non solo per le fedi (…) Il mio scopo è creare consapevolezza della necessità di ricorrere a forme alternative di potere come le istituzioni internazionali. Non lasciare che gli stati si risolvano le questioni fra di loro ma coinvolgere tutta l’umanità… mi sembra che le due cose siano parecchio diverse. Per parlare di dialogo interreligioso, tolleranza e rispetto e per praticarli, servono istituzioni e sistemi normativi. Finché restano il tentativo di singoli, non hanno possibilità di riuscita, ma se si lavora insieme, non si penserà più in termini di quello che l’altro vuole estorcermi o impormi, ma in termini di comunità umana (…)» (da Diritti umani tra potere duro e potere morbido di Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im)
(…) The network of fundamental rights gives everyone the dignity of a person, leaves no one shipwrecked in their own destiny, keeps alive the hope of peace, freedom, equality. Human rights are therefore a limit both to the authority of States and to the unconditional freedom of individuals; they represent the paradigm and the litmus test of the very juridicality of the legal systems. There is no law, no right, no justice without the full recognition of rights and the effective possibility of realizing them. (…) When the protection of human rights breaks the logic of borders to affirm a public order of justice for people, one must have the courage to consider the centrality of man as a link between the various constitutional traditions, different sources of law, and even the different jurisprudences, national and international, which require, indeed impose to accept the virtuous and reciprocal contamination of juridical knowledge as a lever and anchor of a firmly communal and supportive perspective. The perspective of rights breaks down all ideological barriers. The distinctions between internal and external law, between common law and civil law, between public and private, blur. (…)
Pietro Grasso President of the Senate of the Republic
What are the properties that make someone a certain individual and distinguish from everything else that exists in the world? Are they purely physical properties or are they also mental characteristics? What is the nature of human persons? What causes a given person to exist at different times, surviving a drastic series of changes, but always remaining the same entity? And what changes could it not survive? (…) From this first list of questions two main themes emerge: the problem of the nature of people and that of the criteria of their identity over time.
Michele Di Francesco – Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani – VII Appendice (2007)
LEAVING NO ONE BEHIND Towards Inclusive Citizenship in Arab Countries Research Paper published for the United Nations Development Programme – Regional Bureau for Arab States
Authors: Adel Abdellatif, Paola Pagliani and Ellen Hsu
Introduction Building inclusive societies has been a challenge in Arab countries, and the limitations in inclusion have become more acute since 2011, as the relationship between citizens and the state — and among various social groups — has deteriorated in some countries. Despite different governance structures, all Arab countries manifest serious fault lines in modern notions of citizenship. The starting point of this paper is that the Arab region’s human development fault lines have grown more complex since 2011 — and deepened in several countries. Today many people live insecure lives, more people live under persistent pressures that inhibit them from realizing their potential as human beings, and too many lives are cut short as armed conflicts take their grim toll. If the ongoing conflicts are not resolved and demographic projections of faster population growth in crisis countries are realized, 40 percent of the people in Arab countries will live in crisis and conflict in 2030, when the SDGs should be achieved. Achieving the SDGs in Arab countries thus requires addressing the most debilitating development problems related to citizenship in a region where the relations between the state and society remain deeply fraught and contested amid political, social and economic fragility. Given the importance of understanding, and potentially explaining, manifestations of exclusion and inequality, the link between citizenship and human development needs to be further explored.
Authors: Pacello, Maria Cristina, Huber Daniela, Kerrou M., Nouira A
Introduction
The paper will first provide a background analysis, based on a critical review of the discourses of the EU and other key international and regional players, discursive positions of civil society actors (including at this stage only documents produced by civil society networks which span the Mediterranean) and the academic discourse. The aim is not only to de-construct the EU’s own discourse on democracy, human rights and now resilience; it also juxtaposes it to the discourse of other top-down and bottom-up actors. The academic discourse produced in Europe takes a specific role in this overall picture as it generally sits within the larger EU discourse, even though a critical literature is emerging which resists this discourse. It is to this latter literature that this work package seeks to contribute. The second and third parts of this paper, therefore, depart from the Euro-centrism of the literature in two ways. First, the second part gives an introductory overview on the central role played by civil society in the Arab uprisings and beyond. Unfortunately, very little is known in the literature about how individual and civil society actors based in the four country case studies perceive their own role in their countries and which political ideas they are promoting for their countries. The third part of this paper, therefore, outlines a methodology aimed at filling this gap by conducting discourse analysis of relevant documents produced by a selected number of civil society actors in such countries, and conducting recursive interviews with these stakeholders.
State–society relations in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have been deeply impacted by the dynamics around collective identities in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings and of other domestic and regional far-reaching developments, such as the failed coup attempt in Turkey or the ramifications of the Syrian conflict. It is therefore of utmost importance to discuss the changes (or lack thereof) in the articulation of collective identities, what pressures shape them, and what impact this has on the societal actors and ultimately on their relations with the state institutions and policies. In this regard two trends can be identified whereby pluralization and hybridization in certain countries, for example Morocco and Tunisia, stand in opposition to entrenchment and polarization, as illustrated by the Israeli and the Turkish cases. The result is heightened conflictuality in state–society relations and within societies at large in the MENA with the risk of spillovers at the regional level.
This MEDRESET Policy Brief summarizes the findings of MEDRESET’s WP7 on migration, mobility and asylum in the Mediterranean and identifies policy implications.
Migration, asylum and mobility represent an increasingly contentious field of governance in EuroMediterranean relations. In the Mediterranean area, cooperation in this policy field has long been characterized by fundamental divergences of interests and approaches, not only between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, or between (predominantly) sending, transit and receiving countries, but also among institutional and civil society actors on both sides of the Mediterranean. (…)
By adopting a non-Eurocentric approach, and based on extensive empirical research, WP7 found that the EU’s discourse in the migration policy field is informed by two dominant frames – unilateralism and securitization – which translate into largely Eurocentric, securitizing and conditionality-based policies and practices. Moreover, WP7 found that, despite the existence of country-specific issues and different migration policy agendas in the Maghreb and the Middle East, SEM (South-Eastern Mediterranean) stakeholders in the four target countries (Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey) share a common perception of EU migration policies as abusively and inappropriately restrictive and ineffective, elaborated in a unilateral way and imposed through unbalanced power relations.
With a high level of consensus among themselves, they recommend that the EU radically change its approach to Euro-Mediterranean relations and to migration governance in particular, in order to make it less Eurocentric and security-oriented, and more inclusive, balanced and responsive. This policy brief describes, firstly, how stakeholders perceive the Mediterranean space and EU practices in it, and, secondly, which alternative policies they recommend.
The EU legal and political framework reflects a strong commitment to promoting gender equality. Policy dialogue, gender mainstreaming and targeted gender programming are some of the instruments that the EU uses in “partnering countries”. There is a noticeable difference in how the EU approaches gender equality internally (within Europe) as opposed to externally (partnering countries and foreign aid), which not only reflects the economic and political “power over” approach but suggests as well that the EU is setting the gender agenda on behalf of its “partners”. The findings of this paper illustrate that the EU gender equality approach is falling short from adopting a more substantive transformative approach that would lead women to realize their “power within” to claim their rights. Furthermore, EU support to gender equality relies on short-term projects that focus on addressing “trends” determined by the international community and/or the EU priorities for the country, which undermines the substance of the international and EU agendas. On many occasions the findings show that consultations on local priorities are not sufficiently inclusive and rely on the same “favoured organizations” to inform them. The EU’s contribution to promoting gender equality was reported as insufficient, inconsistent and not responsive. MEDRESET papers indicate that gender equality was not systematically or effectively addressed in sectors of agriculture, migration, industry and energy. The mismatch between, on the one hand, the EU focus, and on the other, local priorities and addressing specific gender needs, including socio-economic needs of women, was strikingly evident. The EU role in realizing gender equality and human rights has, especially after the Arab Spring, been somewhat conflicted. EU has prioritized its self-interest and security (hidden influences and powers) over human rights and gender equality in the region. There was general agreement that the EU should “adopt a more critical stance toward human rights violations including women’s rights”.
This report aims at combining the research results of the previous Work Packages (1–7) of the MEDRESET project with a view to evaluating the effectiveness and potential of EU policies. It does so through an analysis of the EU’s framing of the Mediterranean and how it is perceived by its Southern and Eastern Mediterranean (SEM) partners, how the key stakeholders depict the region as such, and how these conceptions and perceptions of the Mediterranean are reflected in their interaction in substantive issue areas, on the geopolitical and sectoral level. The major argument of this report is that the EU’s depoliticizing, technocratic and securitized approach towards the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean erodes the Union’s credibility, detracts from its effectiveness and seriously limits its potential in terms of providing bottom-up policies geared towards promoting democracy, human rights and the rule of law, prioritizing development, favouring youth employment and gender equality, and creating an open, inclusive and integrated Mediterranean region. The findings of the WPs 2–7 proved that the arguments put forward by WP1 were accurate and the research conducted through interviews with key stakeholders and bottom-up actors in the region and in Europe demonstrated that they also regard the EU’s approach towards the region as highly Eurocentric, interest-driven, top-down and thus unequal/asymmetric, as well as depoliticizing, technocratic and highly securitized.