The Story of Constantine's Cin-Club, a

Cinema to Claim their Own

by Chafia Djemame, Daikha Dridi
Daikha Dridi interviews Chafia Djemame, founder of the Womens Cin-club in Constantine,
Algeria.
While barely in her thirties, when Chafia Djemame founded the Womens Cin-club with friends from
Algerian universities, they were surrounded by young women so young they affectionately referred to
her and group of friends as middle-aged. From Jijel, an eastern port city, Chafia recounts the
adventure of the cin-club in the 1980s, in the heart of Constantine, one of the most conservative
cities of the country.
Available here in French (PDF).
In the 1980s you founded a womens cin-club in the city of Constantine, can you paint a social and
political portrait of the city then?
We wanted to create a cultural activity for women in a city renowned for being deeply entrenched in
tradition, the Algerian islamist reformist movement was born in Constantine, it is a city located in the
interior heartland, not very open to the exterior, the rest of the world. It is not a port like Algiers or
Bejaia. Henceforth a very regressive city where Islamist movements in their diverse variety existed as
far back as the 1970s. On university campuses, for example, conflicts between students were already
mired in the dichotomy of islamist versus non-islamist.
This was happening prior to what is referred to as the democratic opening in 1989 and the 1988
protests. In 1986 in Constantine we could already detect the tell-tale signs, with a student protest and
strike that lasted for months as well as arrests of teachers and students. These were the precursors of
1988. It is in this environment of intellectual dynamism and effervescence, the desire and need for
spaces for expression that the idea of a cin-club was born.
Why a womens cin-club?
The cin-club was founded in 1986 by three women, university professors, and launched on the 8th of
March. We called it the Womens Cin-club but on the March 8th 1989, after a particular screening
framed within this title specifically, the cin-club was transformed and became attached to a womens
association.
I taught linguistics then, my two other friends taught chemisry and library science. It was important for
us to identify it as a womens cin-club to distinguish from a student or teacher cin-club, and also
because in 1986 there were a number of incidents targeting women that year, overt machist behavior,
campaigns organized by pre-Islamists groups, a sort of social and political control from Islamists
groups regarding women.
Was the Womens Cin-club in the university campus?
No, the cin-club was based in the Constantine Cinmathque. The idea was born in the campus, but
the intention was to create an activity decidely for the city and its female constituency. Our audience
was diverse across generations, social classes and political diversity, there were high-school students,
workers, we quickly totalled 20 women who ran the screenings.
The Cinmathque was in crisis then, its audience was dwindling, resources drying up, they could no
longer host filmmakers, festivals, etc. The space was furnished with equipment and matriel and run
by technicians, but needed the livelihood of a cin-club to resurrect it.
Where is the Constantine Cinmathque located?
It is right before the suspended bridge of Constantine, at the meeting of three arteries built by the
colonial to beak-up the old citys fabric. So the Cinmathque is really at one end of the old city and in
the heart of the modern city, surrounded by high-schools, colleges, popular neighborhoods, and some
hundred meters away from the two most popular markets.
Describe the audience of the Womens Cin-club.
By virtue of its location, in the beginning we attracted a lot of students, but slowly, working women and
young high-school students joined. They were our most challenging audience during the debates and
discussions.
How did you select the film program?
The selection was culled from the Cinmathques stock. It was out of the question we incur additional
costs on their resources, so we plumbed old archives of the national cinmathque, the films were
livered from Algiers. It was a bit of a mess, we would request a title and another one was dispatched
Grossly, we had identified general lines: first was the question of language, we wanted the discussions
following screenings to take place in Arabic and the films in Arabic to the extent possible. This is why
we started with Egyptian cinema (for example, Salah Abou Seif), films with social themes that allowed
young women in the beginning our largest constituency to discuss social issues, but also to
compare the Egyptian cinema broadcast on Algerian television and the one they discovered at our
cin-club. The latter usually inspired the most lively post-screening discussions, because they paved
the way for discussions of womens living condition in general, the significance of marginalisation, the
issues salient to Arab cultures across countries. After a while, once we had established a reputation
and credibility, we were able to finance our own activities. We even managed to invite a Moroccan
filmmaker who came and screened her film, it was a little exoticizing but defended the place of
women in Islam. I remember that for us, hosting a film presented by its filmmaker was a big event.
Was it difficult to institute the Womens Cin-club?
What baffles me till this day is the extent to which the word women was bothersome. At the time,
when we launched the idea of a womens cin-club, we printed posters that simply read if women are
interested, and listed time and place of the meeting. That first meeting ultimately did not take place
because there were more young and older women than seats in the room! Shortly thereafter we found
ourselves embroiled in an tough arm wrestle with the university administration because it was a
womens cin-club. They proposed all sorts of compromise formulations, cin-club only, the cin-
club of the city of Constantine, the Meriem Bouatoura cin-club she was a mujahida (nationalist
fighter) of sorts, anything they said as long as the word womens was not included. The debacle
reached the Ministry of Higher Education, because we needed a license for a public activity of this
sort. The battle lasted until the following school year. We presented the authorities with a petition
signed by more than a thousand women, we mobilized seven to eight hundred women in front of the
university administration building, only after all this was the cin-club officially established.
How do you explain this controversy your use of the word womens, was it Constantines
conservatism?
No, clearly the ministry was as discomforted as the university administration. In my opinion, the word
women had a political resonnance, and at the time, anything with a political connotation was feared.
When students celebrated the International Students Day, on May 19th, a high tension reigned,
because there was expression of a political will in the midst of the campus. We were in an Algeria
where the order was to adhere to the official discourse.
In preceding years, political activism in the midst of cin-clubs was perfectly well tolerated
To the universitys authorities as well as to the citys, a womens cin-club was potentially a source of
troubles, a discordant voice. The 1986 protests in Constantine that started on the university campus
and spilled over to the city led to a clamp down by the authorities. The university was under tighter
surveillance, specifically the Constantine campus.
Were there more obstacles once the cin-club was launched?
The cin-club was never censored, we had a few problems, for example threats to some of the women
that frequented the club. In no time the schedule of the sessions for women became known to the
entire city, consequently, courtship sances emerged around the screening sessions but also
incidents of aggression.
The screening sessions were not mixed?
No, there were intended strictly for women, a choice that earned us criticism from all sides. Those self-
described as progressice did not understand why we organized an activity strictly for women when we
were supposed to fight for gender mixity, which we had done in other contexts. Islamists critized us
because we robbed them of a specificity they claimed to monopolize, particularly at a time when they
were organizing gender-segregated halaqate (religious circles). They were disturbed that we borrowed
a practice that did not shock traditional social mores, thus earning approval, for activities they deemed
much too subversive because they were aware of the issues discussed after the screenings. How
women managed to survive in the everyday in spite of brothers, uncles, fathers, ruling order, the State,
and such things. The criticisms leveled were plural and intersected more often than not.
Making these two priori choices, regarding language and gender, are they not forms of segregation?
Once again, the city of Constantine imposed these choices, it is an Arabophone city, we wanted to
reach out to the women residing here, discuss their lived quotidian, how they survived or found their
happiness, we tapped a real and profound need for engagement and encounter
Our rejection of mixity facilitated social acceptance. You know, a year into the running of Constantines
womens cin-club, there were a few articles in the newspapers, as a result teachers and students in
other cities like Stif came to us to help them set-up a similar cin-club in their own cities or
universities. It generated something like a collective unwritten manifesto, but I believe it was really the
choices we made with regards to language and gender mixity, the choice to define a space for us
How did the adventure end?
The cin-club ended slowly, after 1988, the agenda became more overtly militant and the cin-club
transformed into an association with multiple and plural activities.
When you were thinking of creating activities for women and about women, why did you choose
cinema in the first place?
Cinema is more vast Firstly, it is more pleasant and a lot less complicated than a book-club, but
also, and mostly because the choice of cinema was in itself a provocation in a city like Constantine,
where movie theaters, even for male audiences, no longer existed. When I was a student, there was
one theater that accommodated for a female audience and two others in the old city strictly for men,
but even then those theaters had no attendance.
Cinema was the most stellar medium to come into contact with neighboring cultures, to be open
oneself onto the world beyond ones quotidian and yet still be able to see it and talk about
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