ORIENTierungsplan Episode #2: My Name is Not Ali: Misrepresentation in the Media

About

ORIENTierungsplan Episode #2:
My Name is Not Ali: Misrepresentation in the Media
29th September 9pm
at ACUD Kino (Ticket link coming soon)
Screening and Talk with Maissa Lihedheb

Join Tunisian-German filmmaker Maissa Lihedheb for a screening of “My Name is Not Ali”, Viola Shafik’s feature documentary exploring the story of El-Hedi Ben Salem and his collaborative experiences with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In the post-screening discussion, Maissa will explore the question of how Ben Salem’s experiences as a North African man in Europe present a signpost for the ongoing pertinence of racism and fetishization facing North-African/Arab immigrants in Europe today – particularly within the context of Germany.

ABOUT

"My Name is not Ali"
Documentary, Viola Shafik, Egypt/Germany 2011, 93 min, German/Arabic/French with English ST

My Name is Not Ali (Jannat Ali)
His anti-racist film Ali, Fear Eats Soul (1973) gained German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder international acclaim. The protagonist, an Arab foreign worker, was played by Moroccan El Hedi Ben Salem M'barek Mohammed Mustafa, Fassbinder's lover at that time. While the film itself courageously deals with the racism of post-war German society, its makers reproduced the insensibility and invention of the Other, fantasizing their own 'Salem'. Collage-like, through interviews and archive material, My Name Is Not Ali uncovers the invention of El Hedi Ben Salem by the Fassbinder troupe, an image not revised by most of its members till today.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBMM7M1z1Do

Maissa Lihedheb
... born in Germany to Tunisian immigrants. A major in Media & Entertainment Management, she wrote her dissertation about 'Symbolic Annihilation in mass media & its effect on the identity of first-generation immigrants'. Maissa runs the Classic Minority Presents film series in which she screens films that are mainly directed by POC* Womxn &/or focus on POC Womxn narratives and is the co-founder of Bipoc Film Society. She also runs the Curation & Panel discussions for the De:colonize Series run by 14km. She is currently writing a drama-comedy that narrates the story of Yasmin, a German-born with traditional Algerian ancestry. The story takes us through the lives of young immigrants in Berlin - the difficulties a big city brings in regard to dating, mental health, feeling misrepresented by the western/white narratives, & the internal battle they are already fighting with their past & identity. She is also currently editing her first documentary filmed in Tunisia.

•

ORIENTation Plan
... is a series of discussions that decentre Euro-American productions of knowledge as the norm of focus, instead opting to spotlight voices from a region regularly finding itself at the periphery of conversation: West Asia and North Africa (or MENA). Curated and chaired by Erkan Affan, ORIENTation Plan is a monthly discussion in which activists, artists and researchers living in Berlin will be invited to speak on a field in which they organize, create and work; subverting Western discursive supremacy and instead focusing on alternative productions, analyses and pedagogies of #KNOWLEDGE.

The population of countries and societies belonging to the predominant Western world and culture has been summarized under the acronym WEIRD - "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" — however, the members of these WEIRD societies are among the least representative populations in the world in terms of numbers.

ORIENTierungsplan Episode #1: https://bit.ly/2ZASv8m

•

With its exploration called #KNOWLEDGES, the COLLECTIVE PRACTICES program puts its focus on practices that question and turn WEIRD paradigms upside down, break up and recombine them, bring together different cultural approaches to knowledge generation, and address questions such as (among others) how to critically question established hegemonic Western methods (primarily visual and discursively defined) and processes of knowledge production.
http://collectivepractices.acudmachtneu.de/

•

Since 2014 the initiative ACUD MACHT NEU operates three spaces at Kunsthaus ACUD. The aim is to offer room for discourse, exchange and experimental artistic formats. Further projects of Acud Macht Neu are: the artist development program Amplify and the discussion series Kapsel about science fiction literature from China.

Acud Channels:
https://acudmachtneu.de/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCin_lkO8J-BYvHu9C-wNa9w
https://www.facebook.com/AcudMachtNeu/
https://www.instagram.com/acudmachtneu/