A Tunisian Film Festival in Paris: Issues in Reception at the Intersection of French and Anglo-American Approaches to Cultural Analysis of the Diasporas

Abstract

This article proposes an examination of French approaches to cultural analysis as a framework for an assessment of the participation of the audience and its engagement in the reception of the first Tunisian Film Festival that took place in Paris in March 2008. It starts with a short description of the objectives of a strong tradition in French sociology of culture that has sought to understand the articulation of social class with cultural practices through the examination of the patterns of behaviour of individuals, a tradition that has neglected the diasporic dimension. The objective of the article is to examine the place and forms of ‘the national’ in the audience’s response to the festival taking place in a diasporic context and in a transnational film economy. An analysis of the responses to an informal questionnaire highlights the ways in which the audience participates and engages, without any apparent contradiction, both in the values traditionally associated with film culture in France and in a strong attachment to Tunisian films that have not always been valorised in the same film culture.