Director Omar Shargawi in Attendance for Post-Show Q&A!
Attention: This program contains violent content.
Western Arabs is a brutally intimate portrait that follows Omar Shargawi’s Danish Palestinian family over twelve years. Focusing on his troubled relationship with his father, Munir—who opens himself up to intense scrutiny—Omar dives deeply into the complexity of growing up in the midst of personal and residual political violence. Including archival news footage and scenes of Munir from Omar’s scripted films, the result is viscerally and visually mesmerizing.
From the director: “Western Arabs is a film about being torn between two cultures and mindsets. And about immersing myself in my family’s pain and getting to the core of the trauma and the wounded souls. My father is at the heart of it. He brought his war to his family, and this trauma is the seed for my entire being, as well as the reason why I make films. Is the trauma hereditary? Does it trickle down through the genes?”
Omar Shargawi was born in Denmark in 1974 to a Danish mother and a Palestinian father. Shargawi initially worked as a stills photographer and taught himself filmmaking. His debut feature, Go with Peace Jamil (2008), won awards at festivals including Rotterdam, Göteborg, and Transylvania. His documentary My Father from Haifa (2010) won two awards at the Dubai International Film Festival. In 2012, he received the Nordisk Film Award for extraordinary efforts in Danish Film.
Twin Cities Arab Film Festival
Mizna and MSP Film Society present the 14th Twin Cities Arab Film Festival, screening more than thirty contemporary films from Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, Qatar, Syria, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as those from local Arab filmmakers.
Browse Twin Cities Arab Film Festival