Last month I attended “In Between: A Cultural Creative Experience” by Between East which is “an entertainment company and community that celebrates Middle Eastern & North African art, creativity, music, and culture to reveal a new global identity.” Below is their mission described on their website:
“Hollywood and the media have created extreme and often dangerous stereotypes about people from the MENA region and Arab world. Therefore, we choose to highlight stories and work with creators or brands who are actively breaking these stereotypes by diversifying the range and perception of Middle Eastern and North African people. Our goal is to be a bridge between cultures by honoring the complexities, betweenness, and humanity of people from the MENA regions or diaspora.”
I stumbled upon this event after researching Franco-Algerian content makers and singling in on Lina Soualem, a panelist at In Between. Soualem created the touching film “Leur Algérie,” which documents the story of her paternal grandparents who came to France from Algeria. This film discusses their experiences with French colonization, immigration, and their ties to Algeria today. Just last year, Soualem released a new movie called “Bye Bye Tiberis,” which is about her Palestinian mother, famous French actress Hiam Abbass. Because of this Palestinian film’s relevance at this time, much of the content of her panel was centered around this aspect of her identity. However, much of what she talked about was very insightful and helped confirm the direction of my capstone project. She spoke about how her experiences as Palestinian-Algerian-French are different from the experience of the MENA diaspora in the US because of the other standards in French society regarding national and ethnic identity. It helped me to hear her state her point of view directly rather than just deducing it from her work in films, podcasts, etc. Overall, this event was really inspiring and made me really grateful to live so close to L.A. where such amazing cultural events occur so often.
Through Lina, I have found numerous resources and figures to utilize as data in my capstone project. Additionally, I found out that she helped organize an event celebrating Algerian independence right across the street from where I lived in Paris at La Fleche d’Or. Even though I wasn’t in Paris at the time of this event, it is kind of wild to me that we could have easily crossed paths at some point. It excites me a lot to do this research when I know that it isn’t something entirely distant or out of reach for me. I could go back to Paris and know where to find the sort of hubs for the communities I am really interested in learning more about.