Wafa: Among all the films screened at NYFAF, those produced by first-time Amazigh filmmakers or debutants represent some of the festival’s glowing moments. What I deeply appreciate about NYFAF is precisely its commitment to distinguishing itself as a space for the amplification of voices of Amazigh artists through cinema. As I mentioned earlier, the short films on Amazigh Siwa by Assem Khaled opened an entirely new window onto another dimension of Amazighity. Afdis by Azro Magoro from Libya offered another such revelation and provided a rare understanding of Amazigh Libya in the wake of the 2011 revolution. Equally memorable was the screening of Mah from the Canary Islands, accompanied by a Q&A with filmmaker Armando Ravelo and starring actress Laura Perdomo. The premiering of Sounds of Berberia by Tarek El Idriss was another milestone, as was the showcasing of Mouloud Aït Liotna’s The House Is on Fire, Might as Well Get Warm, a film that was screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Yet of all the films that moved me, Myopia by Sanaa Akroud left the deepest personal mark not only through the film itself, but through the story of its making, as shared during the NYFAF discussion. It is a feminist Amazigh film in the fullest sense, and the circumstances surrounding its creation are as powerful as the narrative it carries.  The film shows almost with painful precision, what intersectional feminism looks like within an Amazigh context. It stresses the importance of listening to Amazigh marginalized feminine voices, often unheard by institutions of power, such as the media, authorities, and even human rights organizations that claim to speak on their behalf.

If I were to single out the most intellectually memorable discussion of the forum, it would be the Q&A with Hakim Belabbes following the screening of his film Defining Love: A Failed Attempt.  What made the discussion so remarkable was a moment of realization when Belabbes himself came to understand, in real time and through dialogue, how and why his film could be categorized as an Amazigh film. This is precisely the kind of conversation that sits at the heart of NYFAF’s founding goals. I refer here to the search for what makes a film Amazigh, which Habiba and Lucy undertook when they first started this project. The discussion with Belabbes could serve as a model for how we engage with North African cinema more broadly. The question deserves to be asked openly: why is a North African film that features Amazigh elements such as food, décor, clothing, landscapes, music, archaeological sites, story, and whose dialogue draws on Darija, not also recognized as Amazigh?

Linguist Mohamed Chtatou, in his 1997 paper "The Influence of the Berber Language on Moroccan Arabic," argued that Darija is built on an Amazigh skeleton in terms of its syntax and morphology while its lexicon is a mixture of languages, including Tamazight, Arabic, and others. This linguistic reality applies equally to Tunisian and Algerian Darijas. If the very language spoken in a film’s script is rooted in Tamazight, then why is that film not recognized as Amazigh too? Why is it instead flattened into a strictly Arabic identity? I think it is time to raise these questions seriously and to foster these types of conversations. Doing so is part of a necessary work of undoing the essentialist forms of colonialism that continue to suppress Amazighity in artistic production, I believe.

Lucy: I am the one member of the team who is not Amazigh. I do not speak Tamazight, Darija, or Arabic. I am often unable to fully understand what we are viewing and have to ask questions and educate myself through our conversations about the films. I often notice that I am visually biased, shaped by the media culture of the US and Europe, by my white Anglo-Americanness, and I need to watch films twice or three times in order to get my bearings and start to enter into their symbolic worlds. Perhaps because of this distance and delay, I am sometimes able to discover a common thread or theme that helps me,  and our audiences, who are not Amazigh or from the region, enter the films as if they are doorways into Amazigh homes and ways of life. 

Key themes that emerged in documentary film were coming of age, as captured in the masterwork by Tala Hadid, “House in the Fields,” North African and diasporic identities, as traced by Tarik El Idrissi in “The Journey of Khadija,” and memory and resilience, as found in the remarkable, idiosyncratic oeuvre of the Jewish-Moroccan Amazigh filmmaker Izza Genini, whom we had the immense honor of hosting in 2024. Building on early Kabyle films from the 1990s that first brought Amazigh narratives of colonial trauma and resistance to the big screen, feature films often explore the question of freedom and our relation to land, a key theme in Sanae Akroud’s “Myopia” focused on the female Indigenous gaze, and also evident in the oeuvre of Hakim Belabbes, whom we were lucky to host in 2019. His layered film “Defining Love - A Failed Attempt” weaves an ancient, local tale of conflicted love into a contemporary meditation on the mysteries of nature. 

Yahya: There is not enough space to list all the memorable moments, but I do have some that made me realize how much a festival like NYFAF is worth the effort and the support. I remember two films from the Canary Islands, Aman Estrella Monterrey and Mah Armando Ravelo. If it weren’t for NYFAF, we wouldn’t have had access to these films, and our audience wouldn’t have had the chance to discover them. These films basically resurrect a “dead” dialect and represent a tremendous amount of work to make two short films in the Guanche dialect. The cinematography was beautiful and mesmerizing, and the storytelling captured the essence of ancient life on the islands. Hachkar’s documentary, Tassanou Tayrinou, is also a memorable film that I felt deeply connected to because it chronicles a topic that has been considered taboo in Moroccan society, but Imazighen have always expressed it through their songs and poems. The Journey of Khadija by Tarik El Idrissi and House in the Fields by Tala Hadid are two exceptional documentaries that I remember generated interesting discussions about gender issues and women’s rights, especially since the lead actress for The Journey of Khadija was present. Coming up with themes for our editions is always fun, and it is always a group effort based on everyone’s suggestions. This is what makes NYFAF unique. We tried during the last eleven years (well, nine amazing ones for me) to capture the essence of the selected films while considering current events; hence, the theme we selected for our 2018 edition was Coming of Age in the #MeToo Era. In our attempt to represent all of Tamazgha, we always look for films and documentaries from regions that typically have less representation. We have been successful in screening films from countries where Tamazight was either banned or fiercely suppressed. From Tunisia we screened Azul by Wassim Qorbi, and several others and from Libya Afids by Azro Magora, an excellent short that reflects on how Qadafi’s authoritarian rule suppressed the Amazigh voice. We have also screened a short documentary from Siwa, yet another place where Imazighen still exists despite marginalization. Also memorable are the people we invite and those who join us; they have had a great impact on us and on the necessity to continue this journey.

TSJ: Tamazgha was this year’s theme. The films you showed really focused on land, territory, and mobility whether in the Sahara and beyond. This question has two parts: first, why is Tamazgha important as an object of Amazigh film? Second, what does this centering of a different toponymy do for Amazigh self-understanding? 

NYFAF

Habiba: This year, we have organized our program around a single, profound concept: Tamazgha — the ancestral homeland of the Amazigh people. Tamazgha is a shared cultural, linguistic, and historical space.  It is a homeland that exists in languages, in stories, in music, in memory and on screen. For many of us, the question of homeland carries a particular weight. We are in New York. We have built lives, communities, and families far from Tamazgha. And yet something persists: a language spoken at home, a melody recognized instantly, a story passed down that no geography can erase. This year’s theme is an invitation to reflect on what homeland means when its languages are endangered, and when its people are scattered across continents. It is also an invitation to celebrate what endures despite all of that.

Also, Tamazgha is important as an object of Amazigh film because it names something that dominant cartographies refuse to name. The political maps of North Africa are products of colonial partition and postcolonial state consolidation. They render visible the borders of nation states while rendering invisible the much older human geography of the Amazigh world: a geography organized by ecological zones, seasonal migration routes, linguistic continuities, and kinship networks. When Amazigh filmmakers center Tamazgha they are performing a kind of counter-cartography. They are insisting that the land has a prior name, a prior meaning, and prior inhabitants whose relationship to it cannot be fully captured by the categories of the postcolonial nation-state.

Finally, I believe that cinema is a particularly powerful medium for spatial reimagining because it works through images of actual landscapes (Mountains, deserts…)

Wafa: “Exploring Tamazgha” as this year’s theme for NYFAF emerged following the reception of a remarkably large pool of film submissions for the 11th edition. The submissions represented nearly every corner of Tamazgha. The theme also marks one year after decade of NYFAF. So, after years of exploring varied themes concerning Amazighity and the many dimensions of Tamazgha, it felt like the right moment to understand what Tamazgha stands for. 

As for the second part of the question, I would like to share that in 2025, I presented a talk at the Africa through Language and Area Studies conference at the University of Maryland, where I tackled this issue. The talk entitled “North Africa: an arena of negotiating new names and contesting colonial ones for the recognition of the region's Amazighity”, examined how a long history of Arab colonialism has discursively classified the diverse ethnicities and multilingualism of North Africa under the sweeping and reductive term “Arab World.” It further showed how alternative naming frameworks, such as “Arabic-Speaking World” and, for North Africa, “Tamazgha” open arenas for negotiating and challenging the symbolic violence embedded in both historical and contemporary efforts to erase Amazigh identity in North Africa, and to reconnect the region with its Indigenous and African roots. 

I share this to say that the use of “Tamazgha,” for me, is not merely a geographic designation. It is an emic approach to the indigeneity and Africanness of the territories where Amazigh people have existed and continue to assert their presence. It is equally a decolonial statement to refuse the layered erasures imposed across centuries of successive conquests. Tamazgha predates every nation-state drawn on the map of North Africa, and every colonial order that sought to overwrite it.

Lucy: In many ways, all our work over the past years has led us to our recent theme, Tamazgha, inspired by the persistence of the land as a central character in the films we discover and screen and the power of a border-traversing lens. Amazigh cinema often shows that human identity is fundamentally dual - both local and transnational. The self-narratives are shaped by human-to-human bonds – by families and communities, as seen in many films –  and also by larger histories that reach beyond national borders and inter-national conflicts. Especially in this moment of mass migration and ethno-nationalist rhetoric and violence, recent Amazigh films offer an instructive experience in moving across a region, across Tamazgha, often at the slow and labored pace of a character’s footsteps or across borders in search of a new sense of belonging. The vastness of the land strikes us, and also the resiliency of the characters who traverse it. As we see in Sofia Alaoui’s feature, “Animalia,” screened this past April, humans and human procreation are put into the context and scale of an ecological crisis that calls forth older, Indigenous tools for communicating and surviving. 

For those outside of the Amazigh and Indigenous worlds, culturally and geographically, this visual immersion in Tamazgha may not be easy or immediately decipherable. It demands effort and contextualization, and it forces viewers to slow down, to lean in, and to ask questions. What is our current relation to land? To the natural world? To our technological tools? Are our relationships to each other in sync with this natural world or dangerously askew? If so, what is our responsibility? I see NYFAF as offering this challenging opportunity and useful contextualization.

Yahya: As previously mentioned, one of the forum's primary objectives is to transcend the national borders of countries where Amazigh culture exists. This is especially vital in film, as it portrays the land as a unified territory shared among Imazighen. Tarik El Idrissi's Sounds of Berberia is a film that perfectly captures this sense of belonging to Tamazgha through music. Film, as a visual medium, allows audiences to witness diverse geographies and hear various dialects while still recognizing them as part of a single language, land, and history. This connection is essential for reclaiming what has been marginalized and for building a community that shares more than is often realized. The use of Tamazgha and its derivatives highlights the importance of naming; this process is particularly significant because the term "Berber" is a remnant of colonial heritage and adopting Tamazgha is, in itself, a decolonial act.

TSJ: Film is an important medium for intergenerational transmission of knowledge as well as commitment to Amazigh identity. This acquires an even bigger importance in the US context in which indigeneity is an important topic. How has the engagement of the younger generation of Imazighen/Timazighin with NYFAF changed over the years?

NYFAF

Wafa: I touched on this briefly earlier when I spoke about the young Amazigh filmmakers who, over the past 11 years, found in NYFAF a platform willing to both encourage their vision and showcase their work. Yet NYFAF is not confined to cinema alone. It has equally opened its arms to younger generations of musicians and dancers. Kabyle bands, Gnawa ensembles, Tashlḥīyt musicians, Chaoui dance workshop choreographers, and even Tunisian Amazigh rappers have all performed at NYFAF before diverse international audiences of students, faculty, and other attendees. Each performance has been not only an artistic show but a cultural affirmation. One recent example is the Amazigh tattoo workshop NYFAF hosted last year with the Tunisian artist, Alia Benslimen. For her, the experience was far more than a professional opportunity.  The workshop became a space for her to look carefully and meaningfully at Amazigh tattoos. It was also an opportunity to share her reflections on the ancient symbols that many women in her native town, Sejenan, still carry on their skin and pass down through generations.  Through the Q&A and the discussion that followed, Alia was simultaneously learning more about the cultural meanings encoded in those marks. Like me, Alia had spent much of her life believing she was Arab until she started working on Amazigh tattoo art over the last few years in the USA. This is, I believe, the quiet genius of NYFAF. Those connections it creates between generations from North Africa and the diaspora and their Indigenous identity through art, cinema, and conversations, and through those sudden, breakthrough moments of recognition, when something you have seen all your life suddenly reveals itself as yours. 

Lucy: From the beginning, we’ve embraced the work of amateur and young, emergent filmmakers. We’ve established a Shorts Competition that attracts these newcomers, and we continue to open the Forum to their work and follow their progression. For example, we screened Sofia Alaoui’s first short, “What if the Goats Die’ and just now screened her first feature, “Animalia.” To watch her progress as a visual storyteller who employs an Amazigh lens on character and human values and uses the Amazigh language as a vehicle of universal expression is immensely moving. Amazigh cinema has come a long way.

Yahya: We have successfully reached a wide number of emerging filmmakers through our short film competition. The forum has inspired many young filmmakers to produce  works centered on Tamazgha, and we now receive a substantial number of submissions annually compared to the number we used to receive in earlier editions. Engagement also occurs through our scholarly efforts; at various conferences, we interact with younger generations discussing and researching Amazigh cinema. We have, also, been supported by enthusiastic interns, many of whom are of Amazigh origin. Regarding indigeneity, one of our core goals is to inspire young Imazighen and Timazighin to take pride in their roots and join a global community of indigenous experiences. 

TSJ: What is your vision for the festival in the coming years and what are some of the challenges that you encountered?

NYFAF

Habiba: When I founded NYFAF, I never imagined it would grow into what it is today: a gathering place where filmmakers, scholars, and artists from across the world come together to celebrate and interrogate a cinema that most people have never heard of. As I mentioned before, that invisibility is precisely what drove me to create it. In my research on Amazigh cinema, I kept running into the same walls: filmmakers struggling to secure funding outside of state-controlled channels, the deeply political question of whether a film "counts" as Amazigh if it is not in Tamazight — or which script it should use — and a distribution landscape that makes it nearly impossible for these films to travel. Even defining what Amazigh cinema is remains an open, sometimes contentious question. My vision for the coming years is to make NYFAF a space that holds all of that complexity without trying to resolve it too quickly: to keep bringing new voices into the conversation, to grow our academic and publishing work, and to ensure that this cinema is not only seen, but taken seriously on its own terms. It has not always been easy, but every edition reminds me why it matters. 

Wafa: The more NYFAF lives in our tassa, the more we love it from that deep, gut place, the longer it will not just survive but thrive. Unless that love is no longer from the tassa but migrates to the heart or somewhere else, which might make it a little less Amazigh. JOKING, of course!!! But in all seriousness, as long as we stay committed to this forum as we always have, it will keep growing. I can feel it. Now, as for the challenges, I am going to answer that one sideways. Picture every major film festival you know: the budgets, the red carpets, the spotlights, the trophies. Now picture NYFAF, eleven years strong, yet none of that. I think that says everything. I will leave it there and let the reader connect the dots. 

Lucy: Our biggest challenge has been finding and accessing films. In the future, a major goal we have is to collaborate on establishing an open archive for the distribution of Amazigh cinema. This archive would be for filmmakers, film scholars, teachers and interested viewers. We’d like to also share our pedagogical assignments and make these materials available to educators. In sum, we’ve assembled a fascinating body of work, and we can start to focus on finding ways to make it all much more available. 

Yahya: Securing adequate annual funding remains a primary obstacle to organizing the event, expanding our audience, screening more films, and inviting more filmmakers and scholars. Looking ahead, I envision the forum will continue to promote Amazighité and bridge the generational divide among filmmakers. Our goal is to curate a body of work that reflects the authentic lived realities of the Amazigh people while dismantling stereotypes.

TSJ: An important question arises from your superb and enthusiastic responses to our questions has to do with both sustainability and inter-Indigenous solidarity. How do you continue organizing NYFAF, which is a celebration of the indigenous voices of Tamazgha through cinema, without falling short of your responsibility to acknowledge that you are doing so on the land of other Indigenous peoples?

NYFAF:

Habiba: My colleagues have addressed the above question (inter-Indigenous solidarity) in an eloquent way. Here is one question that our team could tackle in the near future: In a world where streaming platforms have made global cinema accessible, why does Amazigh cinema remain largely unknown? What does that persistent invisibility reveal about the deeper structures of power, cultural recognition, and representation that NYFAF is working against? 

Wafa: This question has haunted me for years, yet I have rarely brought it openly into discussion. It actually goes back to the very first NYFAF edition I attended when I was sitting in the back of the theater, as I mentioned earlier in this interview. One film from the lineup of that edition that never left me was: Native Lands (Ni Barbare Ni Sauvage) by Roger Cantin. The film featured an encounter between an Amazigh artist and an Inuit singer if I recall it correctly. The Inuit people, as is known, are among the Indigenous peoples of Canada. Over the years since joining NYFAF, I have been vexed by how we could recreate and deepen that kind of encounter. How do we create a space in NYFAF where the Amazigh story (stories) can speak to and with the stories of the Indigenous peoples of this continent? What would be the most meaningful way to reach out to the Indigenous peoples of this land, reconnect through cinema, pick up the conversation that began in 2016 with the screening of Native Lands, and ask what we can build on it? Beyond acknowledgement and solidarity, I am seeking concrete dialogue and exchange through NYFAF. I suppose I have answered my question with more questions. But for now, that is where I am or where I stand, honestly.

Lucy: I was born on the ancestral lands of the Pequoit, Algonquin, and Wampanoag peoples in what we call New England today. My mother’s family were early settlers in Rhode Island and must have encountered and also witnessed and participated directly and indirectly in the wars and continual aggressions against Native people, though no story of it was passed down in my family. Growing up, I was struck by this silence, and yet aware that most of the place names around me were and remain Indigenous, pointing to Native knowledge of the land and authority in their encounter with settlers. From my grandfather, a man born in 1905, I learned that contact was common in the early 20th c. among working-class Anglo, Native and Black men who all migrated seasonally, combing the sea for seafood and gleaning the fields at harvest times. They also worked together at the gristmills to produce cornmeal, a core staple. Every Thanksgiving he would use it to make “Indian Pudding,” a kind of sweet gruel cooked in a slow oven that speaks to the encounter of Native, Irish and West African cuisines.

I mention my background because it drew me to the Indigenous core of Amazigh expression, and I am proud NYFAF has found ways to explore inter-cultural and inter-Indigenous connections. For example, in 2018, Habiba and I were invited to present on Amazigh cinema at the “Fields of Conflict” Conference organized by the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Connecticut. Both an extensive museum and a pedagogical space, the Center inspired us to think of NYFAF as an exploratory preservation tool and an inter-cultural learning framework. It also gave us early practice in drawing connections across very different regions and continents for a scholarly audience.

Another step was our decision to publish our edited collection Amazigh Cinema with the University of Regina Press (URP), a Canadian University press dedicated to promoting the Indigenous arts and narrative forms of North America. The URP editors were inspired by the breadth of films NYFAF has been able to identify across Tamazgha that speak to a common Amazigh life experience. They thus invited us to inaugurate their first global arts series, “Indigenous Voices in World Arts and Cultural Expressions.” This role is an honor for us and a meaningful opportunity for Amazigh expression. 

And I agree with Wafa! We should build on this effort: we can engage with our students, many of whom speak South American Native languages and are also raising questions about heritage and preservation, and we can reach out to a vibrant local Lenape scene. As scholars, we can continue to study and unpack Indigeneity, a term with complex roots, seeking to situate it historically in relation to Amazighity, to diverse colonial encounters, and to the global community.

Yahya: I think as everyone has pointed out, we do recognize that indigenous struggle is real and collaborations are required more than ever. However, when people hear the word “Indigenous people,” Imazighen are not the ones who come to mind. If they do, some may raise questions about the legitimacy of the name. We have had this happen numerous times. Establishing Amazigh as Indigenous is a work that needs to be done and requires robust academic research in addition to screening films and organizing panel discussions. What Lucy mentioned regarding our collaboration with URP is an excellent first step that needs to be strengthened. Our outreach needs to widen the scope, perhaps by screening indigenous experiences from around the world. In a collaboration with the amazing Sheila Petty on a publication project entitled: “Film festivals and Transnational Flows of Living Cultural Heritage: Africa in the World,” we had the opportunity to meet at a conference with festival organizers focusing on Indigeneity and our exchange was very productive and helped us connect and learn from other experiences. Initiatives like these are essential in creating a network where indigenous groups can meet and share their experiences. Working on two fronts won’t be easy, but I think it is essential to recognize that the Amazigh struggle is not alone and that when we screen a film, we are speaking the language of indigeneity. I would suggest that our next edition should celebrate Indigeneity with a selection of films from other indigenous experiences.