Shagufta Cheema Receives Award for Work

Offering an “impressive and beautifully written study of the work of this celebrated filmmaker” according to the judges, Assistant Professor of Humanities Iqra Shagufta Cheema, PhD, and her co-author Stefanie Van de Peer, PhD, of Queen Margaret University (Edinburgh/Scotland) received the MeCCSA Best Monograph Award for their outstanding research on Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir.

The award was announced on the occasion of the 2024 Annual Conference of MeCCSA, the association for the field of media, communication and cultural studies in UK Higher Education.

In her book, Cheema takes a transnational, feminist approach to the study of Jacir’s oeuvre.

The panel of judges further noted, “This is an important book that offers an in-depth analysis of the films of Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir, whose oeuvre explores the politics of space through experimental modes of filmmaking. The authors provide a rich discussion of the place of Jacir’s work in Palestinian cinema – a cinema necessarily of exile and diaspora. They offer a powerful theorization of the experiences and meanings of being displaced both outside of Palestine and inside the Palestinian territories, which are central themes in Jacir’s work: From the spatial limitations of Jacir’s ‘roadblock’ movies, where immobility caused by checkpoints and uncrossable borders find expression in fragmented aesthetics, to Jacir’s experimentation with ‘heterotopia’ in films contrasting the hopelessness and inability to live fully in the refugee camp with individual and collective experiences of marginal but vital ‘third spaces’ of hope.”

Cheema will be presenting on Jacir’s work in the broader context of Palestinian cinema at the San Francisco Public Library.

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ReFocus: The International Directors Series
The Films of Annemarie Jacir
Iqra Shagufta Cheema, Stefanie Van de Peer
Edinburgh University Press
November 2023 (Hardback)
ISBN
Hardback: 9781474480918
Ebook (ePub): 9781474480949
Ebook (PDF): 9781474480932