Double screening: Straub-Huillet and Atteyat Al-Abnoudy​

For over four decades, the films of Danièle Huillet (1936–2006) and Jean-Marie Straub (1933-2022) have been woven into the history of modern cinema as a continuous thread. While both were French, they worked mostly in Germany and Italy, and made two dozen films between 1963 and 2006. Their films, often adapted from theatrical or literary works, are distinguished by their deliberate use of Brechtian distancing techniques and strong Marxist political overtones. Aesthetically their work has been described as austere with minimal camera movements, long takes, simple, stark settings and restrained acting performances. Rare documents of aesthetic and political resistance to the world’s conditions, their works are characteristic of a great lyrical beauty and radical social formulas. when regarded today, Huillet and Straub’s oeuvre is an always fresh, exciting, and inimitable succession of films on history, painting, nature, politics, music, language, bodies, rhythms, and forms.

Ateyyat Al-Abnoudy (1939-2018) was an Egyptian journalist, lawyer, actress, producer, and filmmaker. Born in a small village along the Nile Delta, Al-Abnoudy was considered one of the pioneering Arab female filmmakers, her films inspiring generations of women fighting to produce their own independent cinema. She has been referred to as the “poor person’s filmmaker” thanks to her focus on the struggles of ordinary and impoverished people in Egypt and the Arab region. Over the course of her career, Al Abnoudy received more than thirty international awards for her twenty-two films, including three for Horse of Mud, released in 1971.

Ali Hussein Al-Adawy is a curator, researcher, editor, writer, and critic of moving images, urban artistic practices, and cultural history. He curated a number of film programs and seminars such as Labor Images (ongoing since 2019), Serge Daney: A Homage and Retrospective (2017) and Harun Farocki: Dialectics of Images…Images That Cover/Uncover Other Images (2018); and exhibitions and public programs such as, together with Paul Cata, the exhibition The Art of Getting Lost in Cities: Barcelona and Alexandria (2017) and the seminar “Benjamin and the City” (2015). He was one of the founders of Tripod, an online magazine for film and moving-image critique (2015-2017) and was part of the editorial team of TarAlbahr, an online platform and a publication for urban and art practices in Alexandria (2015-2018).

Lukas Brasiskis is a Curator of Film and Video at e-flux. He is also a cocurator of the 14th Shanghai Biennale (2023–24). He received his PhD degree in Cinema Studies from New York University in 2022. His writings on moving image are widely published, and most recently he was the coeditor of Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe (Berghahn Press, 2024) and Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running (Yale University Press, 2022). From 2024, he is a co-editor of e-flux Film Notes.