Conferences and debates
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Landscapes of confusion in contemporary Arab cinema
November 05, 20257:00 p.m.
CORDOBA
Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Samuel de los Santos Gener, 9).
7:00 p.m.
Free entry until the event’s capacity is reached.
In Spanish.
On Wednesday, November 5, professor and researcher Cristina Jiménez will
be giving this conference in Cordoba, with her reflections on faith,
perception and uncertainty in relation with Sofía Alaoui’s short-subject
film Qu’importe si les bêtes meurent. Come listen to her.
The short-subject film Qu’importe si les bêtes meurent (So What If the Goats Die?, 2020), by French-Moroccan director and screenwriter Sofia Alaoui (Casablanca, 1990), is a unique example of contemporary Arab cinema at its most speculative and sensory. This work, a forerunner in terms of some of the themes and formal guidelines in her later feature film Animalia (2023), is a reflection on faith, perception and uncertainty when facing the unknown from a deconstructionist vantage point.
Shot in the High Atlas Mountains and spoken entirely in the Tamazight language, the film transcends ethnographic realism through the subtle outburst of the fantastic and the dystopian. Using austere staging, an organic camera and an expressive employment of the landscape as an active force, Alaoui constructs a narrative of gradual perceptual and symbolic destabilization. This creates an aesthetics of confusion which forces viewers to come face-to-face with an essential dialectic: traditional faith versus the emergence of the inexplicable.
The story follows Abdellah, a young shepherd who is forced to descend to the nearest village in search of fodder when his livestock begin to die from snowfall and lack of food. There he finds a deserted place and experiences a series of disturbing events which suggest an inexplicable global collapse has occurred. His identity, rooted in the ancestral and the communal, is deeply questioned. The boundary between natural and supernatural, between the everyday and the metaphysical, melts away, calling into question not only traditional beliefs, but also the very stability of the individual when faced with the unexpected. Qu’importe si les bêtes meurent thus invites us to reflect upon issues closely linked with the present in the Arab world: rural and cultural isolation, the identity crisis when dealing with otherness, the tension between faith and uncertainty, and the Amazigh worldview in the face of the challenges created by contemporary global phenomena.
Cristina Jiménez Gómez has held a PhD in Languages and Cultures from the University of Cordoba (Spain) and the Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour (France) since 2018. She is currently working as a permanent lecturer with the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the University of Cordoba’s Department of Language Sciences. She is a member of the LENGUAJES research group under the Andalusian Research Plan (PAIDI HUM-224), which is directed by Prof. María Paz Cepedello Moreno. Her research activity focuses on three main subjects: narrative and genre; comparative literature—especially the relationship between film and literature—; and hermeneutics. She has also played a role in research projects including “Women with a rural soul: comprehensive linguistic guide to strategies for the sustainability of agri-food biodiversity,” led by professors María del Mar Rivas Carmona and Evangelina Rodero Serrano. Her contributions to cultural associations and organizations include those made to the Ateneo de Córdoba and the Colegio de España in Paris.
Shot in the High Atlas Mountains and spoken entirely in the Tamazight language, the film transcends ethnographic realism through the subtle outburst of the fantastic and the dystopian. Using austere staging, an organic camera and an expressive employment of the landscape as an active force, Alaoui constructs a narrative of gradual perceptual and symbolic destabilization. This creates an aesthetics of confusion which forces viewers to come face-to-face with an essential dialectic: traditional faith versus the emergence of the inexplicable.
The story follows Abdellah, a young shepherd who is forced to descend to the nearest village in search of fodder when his livestock begin to die from snowfall and lack of food. There he finds a deserted place and experiences a series of disturbing events which suggest an inexplicable global collapse has occurred. His identity, rooted in the ancestral and the communal, is deeply questioned. The boundary between natural and supernatural, between the everyday and the metaphysical, melts away, calling into question not only traditional beliefs, but also the very stability of the individual when faced with the unexpected. Qu’importe si les bêtes meurent thus invites us to reflect upon issues closely linked with the present in the Arab world: rural and cultural isolation, the identity crisis when dealing with otherness, the tension between faith and uncertainty, and the Amazigh worldview in the face of the challenges created by contemporary global phenomena.
Cristina Jiménez Gómez has held a PhD in Languages and Cultures from the University of Cordoba (Spain) and the Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour (France) since 2018. She is currently working as a permanent lecturer with the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the University of Cordoba’s Department of Language Sciences. She is a member of the LENGUAJES research group under the Andalusian Research Plan (PAIDI HUM-224), which is directed by Prof. María Paz Cepedello Moreno. Her research activity focuses on three main subjects: narrative and genre; comparative literature—especially the relationship between film and literature—; and hermeneutics. She has also played a role in research projects including “Women with a rural soul: comprehensive linguistic guide to strategies for the sustainability of agri-food biodiversity,” led by professors María del Mar Rivas Carmona and Evangelina Rodero Serrano. Her contributions to cultural associations and organizations include those made to the Ateneo de Córdoba and the Colegio de España in Paris.
