Moving Image Labor in Unstable Times: Just in Time Crews and Revolutionary Collectives Across the Arab World

 

These two entities may seem a world apart: Cairo’s revolutionary media collective Mosireen (YouTube’s most watched not-for-profit channel in January 2011) and the UAE’s media free zones, responsible for significant elements of an increasing array of blockbusters, including Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Yet, by placing analyses of them in dialogue, propelled by investigations of rapidly shifting political and capitalistic organizations of employment rights in the Arab world, their similarities and divergences reveal a lot. They speak of what it means to labor for free in film and to weather the exigencies of certain prevailing modes of transnational production.

 

Kay Dickinson works in the Film Studies department of Concordia University. She is the author of Off Key: When Film and Music Won’t Work Together (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond (bfi/Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

 

Sponsored by the Mellichamp Global Dynamics Speaker Series and the Department of Film and Media Studies Colloquium Series