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The Timimoun International Short Film Festival, in its first edition, places emphasis on training. Three technical workshops, dedicated to cinema professions, will be organized from November 11 to 17 to introduce young people to the workings of the seventh art. This was stated in a press release from the organizers.
This series of training focuses, according to the same source, on cinematographic decoration, artistic makeup and the profession of stage manager. Three specialties essential to audiovisual production, but often not easily accessible in regions far from major cultural centers.
These workshops are aimed at trainees from professional training centers in the wilaya of Timimoun as well as those from other wilayas in the Great South. They will be supervised by professionals from the National Association of Cinema and Audiovisual Technicians, who will bring their know-how and field experience.
According to the organizers, this initiative aims to “equip young people with technical and artistic skills, strengthen their abilities and broaden their professional prospects in the national cinema sector”.
Organized in partnership with the Directorate of Professional Training and Education and supported by local authorities, this action reflects the festival’s desire to reconcile artistic creation and qualifying training.
For those responsible for the festival, this is a first step towards building a cinematographic ecosystem in the South, by making Timimoun not only a place for screening, but also a space for transmission and learning. “Cinema can become a vector of sustainable cultural and human development for the region,” underlines the press release from the police station.
Cinema through the prism of territories
The Festival will also open up to intellectual reflection, with a scientific conference entitled “Cinema, society and territories”, organized on November 17 in partnership with the University of Adrar.
Researchers, filmmakers, critics, urban planners and local development actors will exchange views around an essential question: how can Algerian cinema contribute to rethinking the representation of territories and their place in the collective imagination?
More than twenty years after a first conference held in 2003 in Timimoun, devoted to the relationship between cinema and national narrative, marked by the participation of figures such as Mohamed Chouikh, Malek Chebel, Benjamin Stora and Yves Boisset, the Perle du Gourara returns to reflection on the role of cinema in society.
This new meeting intends to go beyond the historical perspective to address contemporary issues, namely the social, cultural and spatial changes that are crossing the country, and the way in which images can accompany them.
The conference is based on a multidisciplinary theoretical approach, drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre on the social production of space and that of Michel de Certeau on the symbolism of places through narrative and daily practices. Cinema, the organizers remind us, does not just film a space: it reinvents it, giving it a narrative and emotional identity that transforms the perception of the place.
Two major works of national cinematographic heritage, Chronicle of the Ember Years (1975) by Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina and The Clandestine (1989) by Benamar Bakhti, will be at the heart of the discussion. Filmed in Boussaâda, they illustrate, each in its own way, the capacity of cinema to transform a real setting into a symbolic space, revealing the evocative power of the territory on screen.
The debates will also focus on the low visibility of certain regions in audiovisual productions. Vast areas of the country remain absent from fiction and documentaries, and therefore from collective representations, despite their cultural and aesthetic wealth. One of the objectives of the conference is to reflect on ways to correct this imbalance and promote a more inclusive cinematic geography.
For the organizers, the issue goes beyond simple territorial promotion. It is about understanding how cinema can become a tool of knowledge, recognition and symbolic valorization, while questioning the relationships between identity, memory and modernity.
The debate will also call upon perspectives from postcolonial studies, notably those of Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha, to question the role of cinema in the construction of representations of oneself and the other. The goal is not to lock cinema into an illustrative role, but to analyze it as a full-fledged actor in the making of meaning and the staging of the territory.