Luca Bruls Awarded Fellowship Grant for Research and Ethnographic Filmmaking
Luca Bruls has received a Catharina Halkes Fonds fellowship grant to finalize her fieldwork in Chad and Senegal and to complete her first ethnographic film.
From January until March 2026 she will stay in Chad to present and discuss the first version of her audiovisual work, that she filmed in January 2025 with the creative and practical support of Jilles van Kleef and the financial support of the Leiden University Fund.
Film
The ethnographic film is bound to tell a story about care, resilience and movement. It is about the organization of Muslim women in Chad. The viewer follows three women from the Maare clan of Fulani who are, on the one hand, paving the way for a self-aware Islamic standpoint and, on the other hand, paving the way in an environment where self-reliance and perseverance characterize everyday life. The stories of the teachers are linked by shared family ties and the networks they are part of. They each run a Quran school with the help of many sisters. Luca engages in dialogue with women to shed light on the central role of female Muslim scholars in Central Africa and to capture Sufi practices that are part of the contemporary Chadian landscape in their audiovisual complexity. In the ethnographic film, Luca seeks a narrative form in which knowledge and sensory experience come together. The three main characters are (great-)granddaughters of a Fulani scholar and grew up in a Muslim community connected by mobility between city and countryside.
Fund
The Catharina Halkes Fund promotes research and education in the field of gender and religion. Through this, the fund aims to contribute to the development of this academic discipline in the Netherlands. The foundation is named after Catharina J.M. Halkes (1920–2011), who was the first professor of the study programme Feminism and Christianity in the Netherlands, at the Catholic University (now Radboud University) in Nijmegen.
Banner image: still from the film. Copyright: Luca Bruls & Jilles van Kleef, 2025.