JGPACA Film Club is back and we are honored to invite visual artist Maya Louhichi and daughter of the late screenwriter and director Taïeb Louhichi, to present his 1982 Tunisian feature film, "Shadow of the Earth".
Shadow of the Earth (1982) | Arabic: Dhil al ardh ظل الأرض
The last members of an isolated community live in a camp located on a border area. The patriarch occupies one of the four tents that, with the sheepfold, make up the camp. His nephews, his son and their families live in the other three. The wheat reserves are gradually running out and the flock, affected by an unknown illness, is wasting away... The sons leave for the north, to the army and abroad. Only the patriarch and his son's wife remain in the camp, but the latter must in turn go to the capital where the coffin of her husband who died abroad arrives. A chronicle of a community threatened by natural disasters, the border, or the central power, the film is also intended to be a visual poem in which the legend of the Arab and foreign invaders lives again in the memory of men. Samuel Lachize for the French newspaper L'Humanité called the film: "a cry, a song, a poem... through invasions, imposed borders, humiliations, material and physical distress, the lure of a 'West' that is nothing but a mirage.”
The screening will be followed by a post-film dicsussion and sharing of Tunisian food prepared by led by Maya, who is a strong advocate for her father Taïeb Louhichi's work. This screening may take place outdoors, and blankets may or may not be required depending on how the English weather is feeling.
Taieb Louhichi is Tunisian sociologist, screenwriter, and filmmaker. He studied sociology and film directing in Paris. His first feature, L’ombre de la terre, was screened at Cannes in La Semaine de la Critique. In 2006 he was in a car crash which led him to lose feeling in his limbs. That never stopped him. Louhichi continues to make films, which has earned him awards at several festivals. In 2011, he filmed the documentary Les Gens de l'étincelle (People of the Spark) on the Tunisian Revolution. He released L'Enfant du soleil (The Child of the Sun) in 2013. His last feature film was 2017's La Rumeur de l'eau. Taïeb Louhichi passed away in February 2018, at the age of 69.
Maya Louhichi is a French-Tunisian visual artist whose work revolves around questions of memory, identity, the notion of trace, and the body. Trained outside academic circuits, she has produced several photographic series on the theme of bodily expression in the contemporary urban world between 2009 and 2014. Her documentary film "Petites histoires enfumées" (Little smoky stories), made in 2015, intertwines intimate testimonies relevant to Tunisian collective memory.
In 2018, the death of her father, the film director Taieb Louhichi, marked a profound turning point in her artistic research. Drawing inspiration from her paternal cinematic legacy, her current work is deeply imbued with it. She explores the theme of memory from various perspectives, whether intimate, collective, or linked to specific places.
Her work has been selected for the Rencontres de Bamako - African Biennale of Photography in Mali, Jaou Photo (Tunis), and the 18th Summit of La Francophonie (Djerba) in 2022. She was mentored by artist Randa Maroufi for Passerelles 2022, a program by the association Contemporaines. This year, she participated in a residency in Morocco organized by Caravane Tighmert, and her book "Et dans la terre, je me souviens" was launched at the Zoème bookstore in Marseille in April 2024.
The June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive
As a living archive, the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive invite audiences to form an interactive relationship with items within our archive on display at our events, using them as tools to spark discussions on the films we will view together.