Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2024, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

Kurdish cinema represents a vital transnational and global art form that bridges the Kurdish community, uniting a stateless people through cultural expression. This dissertation explores common narrative threads of Kurdish cinema relating to identity, statelessness, trauma, and women's issues, despite the differences between Kurds of various nationalities in both the ancestral Kurdistan region and the diaspora. The first chapter examines how these artworks confront issues of identity, exile, and homeland. The second interrogates depictions of individual and collective trauma in Kurdish cinema, especially generational trauma resulting from racism, conflict, and displacement. Chapter 3 analyzes Kurdish cinema from a comparative perspective through the lens of Indigenous studies, examining how Kurdish cinema confronts settler-colonial oppression. The fourth and final chapter addresses the portrayal of Kurdish women's issues in Kurdish cinema, contrasting how male and female directors represent these issues and emphasizing the vital contributions of Kurdish women filmmakers especially with regard to telling Kurdish women's stories. Ultimately this work positions Kurdish cinema as a powerful artistic movement spanning national and international boundaries driven by the efforts of a distinct filmmaking community united in the desire to represent Kurdish identity and culture through cinematic storytelling.

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2023, Film Studies (Fine Arts)

This project introduces a new reading of Iran's national cinema. This work will cover the films of three different women directors—each with their own cinematic signature—who have been consistently active in Iran in recent years(from 2002 until the present). However, if we consider these directors as a group, do they offer a single perspective? Or is that impossible to assume? Although they are influential filmmakers in Iran, the Western world does not possess a concrete understanding of their works. I believe it is essential to present these faces of Iranian cinema—Manijeh Hekmat, Narges Abyar, and Ida Panahandeh—to the world of film scholars, as each of them has added a new layer to Iranian cinema. After the era of women directors Tahmineh Milani, Pouran Derakhshandeh, and Rakhshan Banietemad, these directors have decided to narrate a different story of women in Iran. Does their work reflect the women living in modern Iranian society? Can we analyze all three directors using the same lens? This thesis argues that there are many factors involved in forming their cinema, including but not limited to government support, personal wealth, and individual tenacity. However, the central factor determining these directors' disparate approaches to filmmaking lies in their relationship to the national cinema of Iran.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, French and Italian

This dissertation examines the problematic location of home, the traditional female activity of homemaking, and the representation of female subjectivity in contemporary cinematic, (auto)biographical, and fictional texts by several contemporary French and Francophone women artists. These writers and filmmakers question the home as a female interior space in which female protagonists traditionally become objects or accessories. They also bring to the fore multiple representations of contemporary French, Algerian, and Tunisian femininity. In these texts, the artists embrace and foreground domestic space, female housekeeping activities, and women's ideological roles in order to (re)appropriate the normative gender discourses of their homelands. They accomplish these goals by revealing how the home within each society functions subversively as a space of socio-political-historical contention. Using Assia Djebar's work as a source of theoretical departure, this study illustrates the representation of women in body, by voice, and through the gaze in a collection of narratives created by French-speaking women artists from the Metropol and the Maghreb. Using feminist film theoretical and lifewriting critical perspectives, I examine the functions of the gaze and the effects of voicing the personal for women of France and North Africa. I also introduce theories of domesticity when considering the role and position of the home in the processes of personal identity formation and social gender construction. This dissertation considers women's coming to voice through women's (re)appropriation of hegemonic discourses of representation, use of language, and authority in speaking as made possible through the domestic space of the home and the arts of homemaking. Through a postcolonial lens of destabilization and the celebration of the in-between, hybrid spaces of first-person feminine expression and representation, I show how the relationship between “center” and “margin” becomes pr (open full item for complete abstract)