TAF2021 Panel: “Arab/Futurism: Speculative Storytelling in Arab Cinema”

In the past decades, we have witnessed a new wave of Arab cinema, deeply grounded in the realities and politics of everyday life in the Arab world and its disparate diasporas. More recently, Arab filmmakers have experimented more with alternative genres and modes of storytelling. While certainly popularized by the proliferation of Western culture, speculative fiction – fantasy, science fiction and magic realism – are not a foreign form of storytelling in the Arab world.

These genres, and by extension, the stories they portray, have proved both timeless and timely. Can Arab cinema translate this success into film? Instead of looking and examining only our immediate present and our recent tumultuous past, should we be rethinking, reconfiguring, and restructuring how we tell stories?