Arab Film and Video Manifestos Forty-Five Years of the Moving Image Amid Revolution

Arab Film and Video Manifestos presents, in their entirety, five key documents that have fundamentally shaken up and helped change the face of image culture in the Middle East and beyond. The book collects together, for the first time, these influential, collectively written calls and directives that span a fifty-year period and hail from a range of different countries. Each urges a radical rethinking of film and video’s role in culture, its relation to politics, and its potential to instigate profound change. Kay Dickinson carefully positions the manifestos within their broader socio-historical contexts and provides supplementary reading and viewing suggestions for readers who cannot access Arabic-language sources.

Kay Dickinson is Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Canada. She is author of Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond (2016), as well as numerous articles on Arab film culture within such journals as Camera Obscura, Screen, Cinema Journal, and Framework. She co-edited The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity (2013), and co-wrote Film Studies: A Global Introduction (2016).