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

Objective

This pioneering interdisciplinary project identifies a new object of study, Muslim women’s auto/biographical filmmaking, and studies the contextual factors that distinguish it within the field of women’s and feminist cinema. Muslim women academic writers, historians, critics and journalists have been instrumental in establishing a distinctly Muslim feminist identity. Taking on a critical, oppositional stance, they have done this through their 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 and formulate strategies for emancipation and equal rights. Additionally, they have turned to the film medium to extend their feminist intent and representations from their particular socio-historical and contextual perspectives. However, research on Muslim women’s contribution to feminist auto/biographical cinema remains a gaping lacuna in film studies. This project aims to fill this gap. Its objectives are: a) To create a corpus by identifying and categorizing the different modes of autobiographical films produced by Muslim women filmmakers from the Islamic world from the 1980s to date. This implies a broad regional focus and extensive work of data mining and organization of women’s auto/biographical cinemas according to geographical, cultural, and filmic criteria. b) To develop a contextual scholarly study on works of representative directors to examine Muslim women’s auto/biographical contribution to feminist cinema in the context of their political, personal, historical, social, and institutional conditions. This implies specific regional focus and a film analysis work to inform a scholarly examination of the commonalities and differences that characterize the films of the studied countries.