Oued Nefifik: A Foreign Movie

Liza BEAR, Oued Nefifik: A Foreign Movie (1982, 28 min.) A comedy of manners in a post colonial setting. A tourist's holiday falls apart in the aftermath of bloody riots in Casablanca, Morocco. Bear's deconstructed screen often mixes film, TV news and text. Since the mid 1970s Liza Bear has created an intriguing body of work that consistently focuses attention on communications issues-specifically the use of media by the press and the disempowered role of the public in communications policy. Central to Bear's work is a desire to tie the means of production (technology) to the reasons for production (capitalistic advantage, national ideology, etc.). While Bear's concerns are global, her approach is always personal and experimental-collapsing the norms of narrative and documentary, subjective authorship and objective document. Cofounder of New York based art magazine Avalanche (1970 to 1976) with Willoughby Sharp. Studied philosophy at The University of London. She has taught at Columbia University, NYU and the School of Visual Arts. Her short stories have been published in Between C and D and Bomb magazine. From 1995-2005 her interviews and profiles of world filmmakers have appeared in Newsday, the New York Times, Ms. Magazine, the Village Voice, the New York Daily News, indiewire and Salon. In 1994 she received an Edward Albee Writing Fellowship. In Autumn 2005 her photographs and videos were shown as part of an Artists Against the War exhibit in Rome, Italy.