Early shoots

While the people of Benghazi were ejecting the Islamist militias from their city last month, a smaller but equally remarkable event was taking place 600 kilometres away, in Tripoli. In the former French embassy, some 70 people were attending the first public screening of Libyan-made films since last year's revolution (and possibly a long time before that). There were just six short documentaries, around five minutes each.

In the final film, Granny's Flags, a Tripoli grandmother recounts how, during the revolution, women had to bake bread before the electricity ran out, and how she'd been kept busy sewing makeshift versions of Libya's reinstated national flag.

"We are happy that Muammar died ... He used to smother us," she says, before telling off Libya's toppled dictator as if he were her own son: "Gaddafi, Gaddafi, Gaddaaaaafi. We got rid of him." And she spreads her hands as if clearing him off the table. The audience burst into applause.

New freedoms of expression are being tested in Libya and elsewhere, post-Arab spring, but the subject of cinema has become particularly pertinent in recent weeks, largely because of a film that has nothing to do with the country itself.

The Innocence of Muslims has become the most famous movie that practically nobody has seen - a clumsy but effective attempt to provoke the Muslim world by depicting the Prophet Mohammed (a sacrilege in itself), and portraying him as a fraud and a degenerate. Benghazi, Libya's second city, was an early flashpoint, and the killing of the United States ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others there on September 11 fanned the flames of anti-American sentiment across the Arab world. Conversely, Western media responded with knee-jerk condemnations of "Muslim rage". The narrative of the Arab spring threatened to take a U-turn.

There is now a cultural vacuum in Libya, as well as a political one, thanks to the Gaddafi regime.