An initiatic journey Videos from an exhibition at the Centre de Cultura Comtemporània de Barcelona from March 26 to May 30, 2002 (a project by Albert Garcia-Espuche and Toni Serra). Into the innermost parts of the city of Fes.Using audiovisual recordings that illustrate some of the different anthropologic, sociologic, urbanistic and religious aspects that make up the fabric of the city. A journey that requires both objectivity (in the working method) and subjectivity (for the experience of the journey and immersion in another culture).

Video Concerning the Arab World

TransArab Itinerant 2003-2005

2003 / 2005 / 2006 / 2009 - TransArab

Video Concerning the Arab World

This programme is not intended to provide an overview of independent video in Arab and Islamic countries, nor does it seek to be representative in any way.

The works being presented, like the programme as a whole, reflect the notion of “slices of reality”, in the sense that they are subjective visions, aware of their partiality, which do not exclude contradiction or conflict. Visions that perceive a strong tension on their surface and take up these eddies of confusion and violence as cause for  urgent reflection and knowledge.

Images and stories, realities in themselves, rhizomatic realities: interwoven without a centre or a fixed meaning. And for that very reason, instead of giving rise to cultural dualism based on opposition, they engender a web of underground connections.

Al Barzaj [Between the worlds] is a poem about the halfway world, between the visible and the invisible, sleep and wakefulness... An inner journey through underground streets, secret gardens.

The director travels with a group of young Moroccan women who are going to visit their families. A story about migration, reunion, and loss.

He travelled to another land, a different sea, and was certain that he had found a better city. But he didn’t realise that his own city was travelling with him.

During the third Rif war, from 1923 and 1927, the Spanish army used massive quantities of mustard gas against civilians, thus making Spain one of the first world nations to use chemical weapons on a civilian population. Eighty years later, a young man from the Rif living in Madrid embarks on a race against the clock to safeguard the memories of the last remaining witnesses of that war. The Spanish government has never acknowledged its crimes. And the victims, now elderly, threaten to die without ever having spoken out about those years of suffocation and death.

Boujad is a personal and anguishing look at issues of separaton, independence and return. As director Hakim Belabbes chronicles his journey from his home in Chicago to visit his family in his hometown of Boujad in Morocco, his exploration of family relationships is self-conscious and at times painfully honest. We witness his most private moments with his family. Belabbes' film intimately explores the domestic spaces and religious rituals of intra-family relationships, especially when compounded by one member's break with traditional values.

Panorama of Moroccan Video. Abdelmajid Seddati (Festival Art Video de Casablanca ) + OVNI. 6th Independent Vídeo & Interactive Phenomena Show

A man planned to get married. From there, everything starts. A series of photos, which retrace his evolution (death, separation, distance and birth) in a fixed frame with a masculine voice in off which tells us the invisible stories behind the photos.