Amazigh Indigenous cinema is gaining new visibility in the United States this fall through university screenings and discussions centered on Taazrit, a short film by Arinas Kaouther Dernouni about a Chaoui woman from the Aures Mountains of eastern Algeria.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Middle East Center, Penn Libraries and the New York Forum of Amazigh Film scheduled a September 30 screening and discussion of the film at the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center. Columbia University’s Alliance Program and Maison Francaise have also listed a November 11 event pairing a screening of Taazrit with a conversation featuring Habiba Boumlik and Lucy McNair.
The film follows Habiba, a woman from Ghassira, and uses her relationship to land, tradition and self-definition to explore memory, belonging and freedom beyond official narratives. Event descriptions emphasize the film’s resistance to reductive depictions of North African women and rural life, presenting land as a space of lived memory rather than a simple object of ownership.
The Columbia event also connects the film to the book Amazigh Cinema: An Introduction to North African Indigenous Film, described by organizers as an English-language scholarly intervention into Amazigh cinema and its role in language preservation, identity and historical witness.
For Amazigh diaspora audiences, the screenings are important because they place Chaoui, Kabyle, Moroccan, Tuareg and broader North African Indigenous film practices inside university conversations on cinema, memory and Indigeneity. They also continue the work of the New York Forum of Amazigh Film, which has helped create North American spaces for Amazigh filmmakers, scholars and viewers.