鬼的狂歡 / Gui de kuanghuang (Ghost Carnival) | La Nouba des femmes du Mont-Chenoua

鬼的狂歡 / Gui de kuanghuang (Ghost Carnival)

D: Qiu Miaojin, Taiwan 1994, 35 min, Taiwanese OV with English subtitles

Qiu Miaojin is best known as the author of Notes of a Crocodile, a lesbian coming of age novel set in Taipei in the late 1980s and published in 1994, shortly before Qiu’s suicide in 1995 at the age of twenty-six. The same year that her groundbreaking book appeared, Qiu made an elliptical narrative film, Gui de kuanghuang, based on her short story of the same name. The specter of the title is Siping, a young woman who commits suicide after experiencing sibling rape; she haunts her brother Jinyang’s memory in the days approaching his twentieth birthday. In Qiu’s Last Words from Montmartre, a posthumously published epistolary novel rich with autofictional resonances, the narrator expresses her love for the filmmakers Theo Angelopoulos and Andrei Tarkovsky.

La Nouba des femmes du Mont-Chenoua (The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua)

D: Assia Djebar, Algeria 1977, 116 min, Arabic/Berber OV with English subtitles

Assia Djebar is best known as a novelist whose work is grounded in the oral traditions of Algerian women. She describes her first film, La Nouba des femmes du Mont-Chenoua, as born out of fieldwork: “The film was constructed from documentary sounds, that is to say, from conversations of peasant women recorded on tape. That’s the primary core of the film. Then I tried to visualize what they were telling me.” One of only two films Djebar completed (along with La Zerda ou les chants de l’oubli [Zerda or the Songs of Forgetting], 1982), La Nouba des femmes du Mont-Chenoua adopts the structure of the musical form referenced in its title to tell the story of a woman returning to her birthplace fifteen years after the Algerian War of Independence.