# margauxfitoussi.com


## Posts

- [Hello world!](https://margauxfitoussi.com/hello-world/): Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

## Pages

- [about](https://margauxfitoussi.com/about/): BIOGRAPHY Margaux Fitoussi is an anthropologist and filmmaker. She received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Columbia University in New York. The nonfiction films she made during her doctorate are an extension of her anthropological interests in history and memory, the migration of people and ideas, and the legacies of colonial violence. They have screened at museums like the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, film festivals like the Tallin Black Nights Film Festival and Mountainfilm Festival in Telluride as well as in galleries such as Cultural Pinakotheke in Sao Paulo, SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, NYU Gallatin Galleries in New […]
- [house of the living](https://margauxfitoussi.com/house-of-the-living/): HOUSE OF THE LIVING Video  Centering on the Jewish cemetery in Tunis, the largest in North Africa, this film follows Muslims and Jews who care for the graves of the newly dead, the recently dead, and the long-departed. By filming practices of care in cemeteries, this film explores what cultural presence becomes after displacement. Under the intersecting, though unequal, pressures of French colonialism, Zionism, and Arab nationalism, the Jewish community’s numbers decreased from over 100,000 in the mid-twentieth century to around 1,000 today. The film tacitly traces the shape of this absence, visible in neglected graves, fractured diasporic genealogies, and […]
- [songs of bahara](https://margauxfitoussi.com/songs-of-bahara/): SONGS OF BAHARA Video | 4:53 | 2021 SONGS OF BAHARA delves into the soundscape of the bahara (fishermen) from the northwest of Tunisia. This sea is mundane, the site of their daily labor; it is hostile, the place where they take hazardous risks; it is home. The work juxtaposes images of the men at sea with a sound composition that blends a fisherman’s voice, telling the story of a day in rough waters, with the everyday rhythms of life on the boat. The film asks: What can we hear, what other sounds resonate, when the sound of the human […]
- [still moving](https://margauxfitoussi.com/still-moving/): STILL MOVING 16mm color film with sound STILL MOVING explores how visual and sonic perception conditions our understanding of time and space. Shot along a 400-meter stretch of wooden fence on the Galician coastline in northern Spain, the film engages the rhythms that shape the way we see and feel time. The film is composed of lateral tracking shots that transform the banal geometry of a roadside fence into a shifting, tactile plane.  It is my attempt to put into practice what philosopher R. G. Collingwood describes, in relation to Paul Cézanne’s open air paintings, as “landscapes that have lost […]
- [mariposa](https://margauxfitoussi.com/mariposa/): MARIPOSA 16mm color film with sound The butterfly stroke is a form as elegant as it is effortful: a human simulation of flight in water. This duality—between machine and organism, imitation and individuality—reveals how culture molds the body through repetition, yet leaves space for unique expression. In swimming, the trained body performs effort as if it were ease, making visible both its limits and its possibilities. Mariposa approaches swimming not as a universal movement but as a practice saturated with cultural scripts, cinematic illusions, and embodied experience. The swimmer’s body in motion is as much cultural choreography as it is […]
- [la piscine](https://margauxfitoussi.com/la-piscine/): LA PISCINE Video | 5:00 | 2021 It’s a summer tradition in Tunisia to escape the heavy heat of the sun and find one’s friends by the pool, the greatest pool of all, the Mediterranean. LA PISCINE is an impression of a place and time, a slice of life in the small seaside town of Tabarka. It is a film in two parts: The first lyrically evokes the filmmakers’ vision of an idyllic summer landscape and the second follows a group of boys who show up every day to run, jump, and swim. Split Videoart Festival; Guadalajara Muestra Movimento Audiovisual; […]
- [translation 1](https://margauxfitoussi.com/translation-1/): SELECTED PUBLICATIONS Waiting for Omar Gatlato: A Look at Algerian Cinema and a Fragmentary Introduction to Tunisian Cinema  The Regency of Tunis, 1535-1666: Genesis of an Ottoman Province in the Maghreb vol. 2 (2025) Excerpt of A Tunisian Yankee (2022) The Regency of Tunis, 1535-1666: Genesis of an Ottoman Province in the Maghreb vol. 1  (2021)
- [long form / academic](https://margauxfitoussi.com/long-form-academic/): SELECTED PUBLICATIONS Dispatches from Home and the Field during the COVID-19 Pandemic (2024) “Metaphor and Memory: A Conversation on the Making of the Film El Hara” in The Venice Ghetto: A Memory Space that Travels (2022) “The Architecture of Home in the Works of Albert Memmi” in H-France Salon (2021)
- [i, tony](https://margauxfitoussi.com/i-tony/): I, TONY Video | 16:00 | 2020 Tony Moussoulides (b. 1934) was a big-shot fashion photographer in Swinging Sixties London. At the peak of his career, Moussoulides shot for Glamour, Marie-Claire and Elle, and worked for brand names like Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel. Though he brushed shoulders with the rich and famous, he never quite reached those heights himself. Now partially blind, and back home in Cyprus, 85-year-old Moussoulides craves recognition, and dreams of creating a Hollywood-style movie based on his life. In this short documentary, which combines archival footage, interviews, and re-enactments, two female filmmakers set the stage […]
- [Flavio-Shiró](https://margauxfitoussi.com/flavio-shiro/): FLAVIO-SHIRÓ Video | 21:00 | 2018 For Flavio-Shiró, the celebrated Japanese-Brazilian painter, time and space are blurred: a shifting canvas of people, landscapes, and cultures. Born in the snow-covered mountains of northern Japan and raised in the jungles of northern Brazil, Shiró moved to Paris in the postwar years to commit himself to a life of painting. His life straddles nine decades, three continents, and two oceans.  Today, he lives alone, surrounded by his art, his photographs, and his memories. Filmed in the painter’s home-cum-studios in Paris and Rio de Janeiro, FLAVIO-SHIRÓ invites the viewer to ponder the meaning of […]
- [si me das a elegir](https://margauxfitoussi.com/si-me-das-a-elegir/): SI ME DAS A ELEGIR 16mm expired color film with sound | 3’ | 2025 SI ME DAS A ELEGIR is a single-shot, handheld film made with expired film stock and accompanied by an original soundtrack. Slowly, sometimes unsteadily, the camera moves laterally, then tilts skyward. The final shot shows the filmmaker loading the film into the developing tank, suggesting the fragile nature of both the moment and the medium itself. Rizoma: Festival Internacional de Cine & Cultura Entrelazada (2025)
- [El Hara](https://margauxfitoussi.com/el-hara/): EL HARA Video | 15 min | 2017 For over 700 years, thousands of Jews lived in the Jewish quarter of Tunis, El Hara. Albert Memmi grew up in this neighborhood. As a Tunisian Jew, he struggled to find his place between the European colonizers and the Muslim colonized. Since then, the neighborhood’s Jewish residents have moved on, but Memmi’s memories still dwell here. EL HARA visually drifts through this neighborhood 75 years after his departure, weaving together reflections of one of the world’s most important writers on the lasting effects of colonialism, domination, and emigration. Atlanta Film Festival (2017); […]
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