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EPL and MENA present: Documenting Syria

With Author Josepha Ivanka Wessels

Evanston Public Library and Northwestern University’s Middle East and North African program (MENA) present talks on the culture, politics, religion, and society of the Middle East and North Africa.

Since the 1970s, Syrian cinema masters have played a defining role in avant-garde filmmaking and political dissent against authoritarianism. After the outbreak of violence in 2011, an estimated 500,000 video clips were uploaded, making it one of the first YouTubed revolutions in history.

In this presentation, Joshka Wessels, author of the new book Documenting Syria: Film-Making, Video Activism and Revolution — the first history of documentary filmmaking in Syria — will show various clips from Syrian documentaries and discuss their social and political significance.

Based on extensive media ethnography and in-depth interviews with Syrian filmmakers in exile, her book offers an archival analysis of the documentary work by masters of Syrian cinema, such as Nabil Maleh, Ossama Mohammed, Mohammed Malas, Hala Al Abdallah, Hanna Ward, Ali Atassi and Omar Amiralay. Wessels traces how the works of these filmmakers became iconic for a new generation of filmmakers at the beginning of the 21st century and maps the radical change in the documentary landscape after the revolution of 2011.

Josepha Ivanka (Joshka) Wessels is Senior Lecturer in Communication for Development with the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University in Sweden and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Syrian Studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Until 2012 she was a documentary filmmaker and consultant on the MENA region, with her work being broadcast on the BBC and Al Jazeera English.

This event is also co-sponsored by the Department of Performance Studies and the MFA in Documentary Media at Northwestern.

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