TUNIS — The organising committee of the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage has opened film submissions for the festival's four official competitions, ahead of a 37th edition that will run from 12 to 19 December 2026.

Entries are accepted for the feature fiction competition, the feature documentary competition, the short film competition and Carthage Ciné Promesse, the section reserved for student and emerging work. Submissions close on 15 September and must be filed exclusively through the festival's online platform at inscription.jcc.tn.

Under the festival regulations, submitted works must be directed by filmmakers of African or Arab origin, must have been completed within the 24 months preceding the event, and must not have been publicly or commercially screened in Tunisia before the session opens.

The call follows a working session held on Monday evening at the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, chaired by Culture Minister Amina Srarfi with the festival's steering committee. According to a ministry statement, the minister called for an "exceptional" edition to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the event, and the meeting reviewed programming orientations, the anniversary celebrations, planned sections, guests and tributes, along with logistics, the budget allocated to activities and the official ceremonies. A significant strand of the edition will be devoted to historical documentation, in partnership with national television and other public institutions.

Sixty years, thirty-seven editions

The gap between the two numbers is the festival's own history. Founded in 1966 by Tahar Chriaa as a militant platform for Arab and African cinema, the JCC was held biennially for most of its existence, alternating with Ouagadougou's FESPACO, before shifting to an annual rhythm in the last decade. That makes it the oldest film festival still active in Africa and the Arab world — older than Ouagadougou, older than most of the national industries it was created to convene.

That founding purpose is the useful frame for reading this edition. Chriaa conceived Carthage at a moment when African and Arab filmmakers had almost no distribution circuit of their own and no venue in which their work was the main event rather than a regional sidebar. Six decades on, the distribution problem has changed shape rather than disappeared: streaming platforms have opened access to audiences while concentrating acquisition decisions in a small number of foreign buying departments, and Tunisian cinemas outside greater Tunis remain thin on the ground.

What an anniversary edition is being asked to do

The documentation strand announced by the ministry is the most concrete of the plans described so far, and arguably the most durable. Sixty years of Carthage archives — prints, catalogues, jury records, broadcast footage held by national television — constitute a primary source for the history of Arab and African film that has never been systematically assembled in one place. Whether that work outlasts the eight days in December depends on whether it is treated as a permanent institutional project or as anniversary programming.

The immediate deadline, though, belongs to filmmakers. Between now and 15 September, the selection committees will decide what the sixtieth year of the JCC actually shows — and, in a region where several national cinemas are producing under war, censorship or funding collapse, which films were able to be finished at all.