Writing and Filming Queer North African Stories

Speaker: Abdellah Taïa

Time: 12:00 pm- 1:00 pm CST

Venue: 206 Ingraham Hall
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Talk Description

In this talk, Taïa will reflect on what it means to write and film queer North African lives across different cultural, linguistic, and political contexts. Drawing on his work in both literature and cinema, he will discuss the relationship between personal experience and artistic creation, as well as the ways sexuality, desire, migration, class, family, and exile shape his characters and artistic practice. He will also consider how moving between literature and film allows him to create new forms of visibility for lives and desires that have often remained at the margins.

Through his writing and filmmaking, Taïa challenges dominant representations of gender, sexuality, migration, and North African experience while opening space for other ways of imagining identity, intimacy, and belonging.

His visit will also include a screening of Taïa’s film Cabo Negro on Tuesday, December 1, at 6:00 p.m. at the Marquee Theater. Taïa will be present for the screening, followed by a conversation and Q&A about the film, his cinematic practice, and the questions of youth, desire, precarity, and belonging that shape the work.

Watch Thriller of Cabo Negro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7m1PMwdspc

Speaker’s Bio

Abdellah Taïa is an acclaimed Moroccan writer and filmmaker. He is the author of numerous novels written in French and published by Éditions du Seuil and Julliard. Translated widely throughout Europe and the United States, his works include Salvation Army, An Arab Melancholia, A Country for Dying, The Day of the King, Living in Your Light, and The Bastion of Tears, whose English translation will be published by Seven Stories Press in spring 2027.

Taïa’s first feature film, Salvation Army (2013), was selected for the Venice International Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. It received the Grand Prix at the Angers European First Film Festival, and Taïa was subsequently awarded the Sundance Institute Global Filmmaking Award in 2016. His second feature, Cabo Negro, was released in France in 2025. His short film Cairo Streets was selected for the 2025 editions of the Locarno International Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival.

His literary work has received numerous prestigious distinctions, including the Prix de Flore in 2010, the PEN America Translation Prize in 2022, and both the Prix Décembre and the Prix de la langue française in 2024.

In 2006, Taïa became the first Arab writer to publicly come out as gay in the Moroccan media. Across literature and cinema, he gives powerful form to lives, bodies, and desires often pushed to the margins, challenging dominant representations of gender, sexuality, migration, and the North African experience.

This event is co-sponsored by the Middle East Studies Program.

The event is free and open to the public.