Middle East Research and Information Project

Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971

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Miriam Rosen

Miriam Rosen was an editor of this magazine in the 1990s and is a Paris-based journalist who covers art and culture.

MER Article

"Images from Elsewhere"

“You chase colonialism out the door, it comes back through the sky,” observed the Algerian Press Service several years ago, alluding to the phenomenon of satellite broadcasting that has literally brought European television into the living rooms of North Africa. [1] More than 95 percent of urban hou

Miriam Rosen • 7 min read

MER Article

For Another Kind of Morocco

On September 13, 1991, after nearly 17 years in the prisons of His Majesty Hassan II, Moroccan activist Abraham Serfaty was released and expelled to France. This was not, to be sure, out of human rights considerations, or a measure of royal clemency: According to the Ministry of the Interior, an “in

Miriam Rosen • 9 min read

MER Article

Toward a World Literature?

The Prix Goncourt, always the biggest literary event of the year in France, became even more so in 1987, when the venerable Goncourt Academy named Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun as its eightieth laureate. In French literary circles, reaction to the selection of Ben Jelloun’s novel, La Nuit saerde

Miriam Rosen • 12 min read

MER Article

Constructing a Cinema of the City

Turkey’s much vaunted “return to democracy” suffered an embarrassingly visible setback at last year’s Istanbul International Filmdays when censors banned four of the 92 films invited for the foreign section: three on grounds of obscenity and a fourth -- Georgian filmmaker Tenguiz Abouladze’s 1968 cl

Miriam Rosen • 8 min read

MER Article

The Uprooted Cinema

My friend Jacques got as far as a screenplay when he died. He was Palestinian (Armenian) from Jerusalem, a photographer by trade, and after his family moved from occupation to Australia, Jacques made his way to the States on a tourist visa. Settling in New York, he found work in a series of custom p

Miriam Rosen • 13 min read

MER Article

Recent Films

Aqabat Jaber: Passing Through. Directed by Eyal Sivan. Produced and distributed by Dune Vision, 1987. Rissala... Min Zamen al-Harb (Letter from a Time of War). Directed by Borhan Alaouie. Produced and distributed by France Media, 1986. Zahrat al-Kindoul: Women of South Lebanon. Directed by Jean Ch

Miriam Rosen • 3 min read

MER Article

Van den Berg, Stranger at Home

Rudolf van den Berg, Stranger at Home (1985). It is no small compliment to say that Stranger at Home is a film you want to see more than once (and should). Over the years -- 19 to be precise -- Palestine documentaries have become a veritable genre, but with few exceptions, they have hardly become a

Miriam Rosen • 6 min read

MER Article

Hanna K. and Farah H.

Michel Khleifi, The Fertile Memory (Marisa Films, 1980). Costa-Gavras, Hanna K. (Universal Studios, 1983). I didn’t make this film to judge, but to transmit the diversity of attitudes. And also, because I can’t forget that as children my brothers and I had to steal fruits and vegetables in order t

Miriam Rosen • 9 min read

MER Article

Visualizing History

Sarah Graham-Brown, The Palestinians and Their Society, 1880-1946 (New York: Quartet Books, 1980).

Miriam Rosen • 12 min read