Our societies are confronted with media that is often more loquacious than reflective, journalists politically and religiously poorly trained, social networks that fuse information and rumor, new ideologies, conspiracies, campaigns of denigration, religious debates without tolerance, and tolerance without conviction. It is enough to observe the difficulty of debate within political parties and movements like feminism connected to questions related to political Islam, of which the wearing of the headscarf is but one symbolic aspect, to understand the necessary imperative to escape from ideological exchange and constraint, to free the discussion.
Since the East, and gradually through a halo effect the West, are at the heart of various debates surrounding women, we place these subjects at the center of our scene: their role or rather their roles, their rights and claims, their activism to resettle religion in the public sphere or, on the contrary, to expel it *. We even went to meet incarcerated women in the jails of Geneva. We are at a time when dogmatic excess tends to poison our societies, whether by the success of extremist parties, the rise of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic tendencies or rejection by recent incoming populations of essential values that make up our cultures. It therefore seems necessary to us, even if partially considered in previous editions, to highlight in 2018 the particular importance of the powerful half of humanity that are women. In our case, we will focus on women from the East, near and far.
* We will not be focusing on the sex scandals that have recently made headlines.
Patrice Mugny
President of the International Oriental Film Festival of Geneva