Saturday, September 30 at 2:30pm | The Main Cinema
About Archives and Secrets (Shorts Segment): Archives allow us to glimpse the past, and they provide integral information for contemporary viewers and researchers to understand and convey stories that might not otherwise be available. But fragments from the past also provide rich commentary on our present, as they interrupt our view of the world, often reshaping and redefining our most deeply rooted ideas. The short films in this segment stitch together archives and secrets––in the form of documents, images, and plants––sharing both personal and collective memories from the past to reimagine the present and future.
About 45th Parallel
Dir. Lawrence Abu Hamdan | 2022 | UK | English | 15 min
Originally built in 1904, the Haskell building was designed as a symbol of unity between Canada and the US and is one of the only cross-border theaters in the world. Anyone can enter unchecked and, though a thick black line runs through the entire building, once inside, —the border all but disappears. Filmed on location to activate the legal and symbolic potential of the site, 45th Parallel unfolds as a monologue in five acts, performed by the acclaimed filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel. The story centers on Hernández vs. Mesa, a judicial case covering the fatal 2010 shooting of an unarmed fifteen-year-old Mexican national by a US Border Patrol agent. At the supreme court, Mesa’s bullet, which crossed the US/Mexico border, began to implicate missiles fired in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Libya. If this murder could be tried in the US, so could the 91,340 drone strikes. Each act of the monologue is demarcated by a scenographic change in the hand-painted backdrop on the Opera House stage.
Director’s Bio
Lawrence Abu Hamdan is a Private Ear, listening to, with and on behalf of people affected by corporate, state, and environmental violence. Abu Hamdan's work has been presented in the form of forensic reports, lectures, live performances, films, publications, and exhibitions all over the world. He received his PhD in 2017 and has held fellowships and professorships at the University of Chicago, the New School, New York, and, most recently, at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, where he developed his research AirPressure.info. Abu Hamdan's audio investigations have been used as evidence at the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal and been a key part of advocacy campaigns for organizations such as Amnesty International, Defence for Children International, and Forensic Architecture. His projects that reflect on the political and cultural context of sound and listening have been presented at the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, the 58th Venice Biennale, the 11th Gwangju Biennale, the 13th and 14th Sharjah Biennial, Witte De With, Rotterdam, Tate Modern Tanks, Chisenhale Gallery, Hammer Museum L.A, and the Portikus Frankfurt. These works are part of collections at Reina Sofia, MoMA, Guggenheim, Hamburger Bahnhof, Van AbbeMuseum, Centre Pompidou, and Tate Modern. Abu Hamdan has been awarded the 2020 Toronto Biennial Audience Award, the 2019 Edvard Munch Art Award, the 2016 Nam June Paik Award for new media, and in 2017 his film Rubber Coated Steel won the Tiger short film award at the Rotterdam International Film festival.
About Mise-en-scène
Dir. Zineb Sedira | 2019 | France, Algeria | French with English subtitles | 9 min
Between the 1960s and the late 1980s, the Algerian film industry flourished, but much of this footage is lost or damaged. In this short video work, artist and archivist Zineb Sedira edits together found footage from various anti-colonial Algerian films from past decades.
Director’s Bio
Zineb Sedira has developed a sensitive practice over the past twenty-five years, addressing migration, storytelling, and the bias of official histories. Born in France to an Algerian family, she relocated to London in the mid-1980s. Her story and that of her family quickly became a fertile ground for artistic experiments. In Sedira’s early photographs and videos, the artist staged her mother, daughter, and herself grappling with the reality of a multi-hyphenated identity (Mother Tongue, 2002) and dealing with the legacy of a conflict characterized by secrecy and trauma (Retelling Histories and Mother, Father, and I, both 2003). Since then, Sedira’s work has reached out beyond the confines of her singular experience and embraced the idea of transit in all its forms. She turned her lens to locations and objects buildings, shipwrecks, scrapyards pregnant with loaded journeys. She has also dug deep into archives of all kinds, complicating readily accepted historical narratives. Meanwhile, formally, the practice has evolved to also encompass sculpture, installation, and performance.
About Don't Get Too Comfortable
Dir. Shaima Al-Tamimi | 2021 | Yemen, Kenya, Qatar, US | English, Swahili, and Arabic with English subtitles | 9 min
When Shaima Al-Tamimi’s paternal grandfather migrated from Yemen to Zanzibar half a century ago to find work , little did he know that migration would continue as a pattern for later generations of his family. Having lived through a deadly revolution in the early ‘60s powered by British colonialism, he fled back to Yemen with members of his family including Shaima’s father. Fifty-five years and five countries later, Shaima has settled in Qatar after being raised in the United Arab Emirates. She is a member of a generation of Yemenis who have grown up confused, marginalized, and deprived of opportunities to thrive due to the limitations of being a Yemeni passport–holder living outside their homeland. Don’t Get Too Comfortable fuses archival images, found footage, parallax animation, and sound design to create a multimedia letter to the director’s paternal grandfather, reflecting on the migration and resettlement of her family following his death over fifty years ago. Family photos, images of archival materials, and self portraits by the director place the viewer in between time and space, calling attention to the collective feeling of statelessness and sense of being felt by Yemeni migrants and their descents.
Director’s Bio
Shaima Al-Tamimi is a Yemeni-East African visual storyteller based in the GCC. Her work explores themes such as migration, identity, and culinary culture through introspection and a deeply-rooted documentary approach. Using photography, film, audio, and writing as mediums, she merges historical and family archives with present-day portraits and visuals to create vivid narratives. Challenging mainstream and linear notions of identity, her work offers unique perspectives into the lives of her subjects and calls for a more nuanced understanding of native experiences.
About Neo Nahda
Dir. May Ziadé | 2023 | Lebanon, UK | English | 13 min
Mona finds archival photographs of Arab women cross-dressing in the 1920s. Somewhere between her fantasies and her reality, she starts a feverish journey of uncovering lost histories and her own identity.
Director’s Bio
May Ziadé is a French-Lebanese writer, filmmaker and the co-founder of production company Other People’s Films. Through her work she explores the physical and emotional unfoldings of the cultural and social pressures to conform. Her first moving image micro-short, Mrs el Araby, looks into the restricted space within which Arab women are allowed to exist in Western media. It was commissioned by the MENA Arts Center UK and screened at the BFI, as part of the TAPE Collective’s program, Encounters Film Festival, Mizna’s Arab Film Fest, and at VIDEOAKTION #3. It was nominated for the DepicT! Award and the Iris Prize’s Microshort award. Neo Nahda is May's first high-end short film, and is supported by the BFI Network and British Council.
About The Secret Garden
Dir. Nour Ouayda | 2023 | Lebanon | Arabic with English Subtitles | 27 min
The inhabitants of a city awake one morning to find that never-before-seen trees, plants, and flowers suddenly erupted throughout the streets and in the squares. Strange and mysterious events start taking place as Camelia and Nahla investigate the origins of these new and peculiar creatures.
Director’s Bio
Nour Ouayda is a filmmaker and film programmer. Her films experiment with various forms of fiction writing in cinema. She is a member of The Camelia Committee with Carine Doumit and Mira Adoumier and part of the editorial committee of the Montreal-based online film journal Hors Champ. Between 2018 and 2023, she was deputy director at Metropolis Cinema Association in Beirut where she managed and developed the Cinematheque Beirut project.
About The Landmarks of Memory
Dir. Christina Hajjar | 2023 | Canada | English, Arabic | 7 min
A tattoo ritual and hookah session memorializes a pre-war flower shop. After seeing its storefront in archival footage of the Lebanese Civil War, a first-generation daughter seeks information and connection to place. Scenes of 1976 Beirut are paired with today’s modern landscape, while roses are etched and coconut coals burn in a snowy diasporic setting.
Director’s Bio
Christina Hajjar is a Lebanese artist, writer, and cultural worker based in Winnipeg, Manitoba on Treaty 1 Territory. Her practice considers intergenerational inheritance, domesticity, and place through diaspora, body archives, and cultural iconography. As a queer femme and first-generation subject, she is invested in the poetics of process, translation, and collaborative labor. Hajjar was a recipient of the 2020 PLATFORM Photography Award. Her film Don’t Forget the Water won the Jury Award and Audience Choice Award at the 2021 Gimli Film Festival, as well as an honorable mention for the 2021 Emerging Digital Artists Award. Hajjar curates the SWANA Film Festival and co-edits qumra journal, both focused on South West Asian and North African moving images.
About Paradiso, XXXI, 108
Dir. Kamal Aljafari | 2022 | Palestine, Germany | Hebrew with English subtitles | 19 min
This short film takes its title from Dante and Borges, as it considers how we see and understand the processes of war and occupation through archival footage of the Israeli military. Director Kamal Aljafari edits together scenes of the Israeli army conducting tests and strategies in the desert. The images feel at once like documentary footage and staged training in a remote and obscure location. Brilliantly spliced together scenes make military maneuvers comical, mundane, and surreal.
Director’s Bio
Amidst fragments of memories and images of a people beset with the insignia of erasure, Kamal Aljafari’s cinema presents chapters of an unfinished story, at once personal and communal. The Palestinian director and artist, born in the city of Ramla in 1972 and based in Germany, has created a poetic filmography marked by restlessness, devising an elaborate mise-en-scene with different modes of resistance against the systematic attempts to destroy subjects, places, and the symbolic field that attest to a Palestinian existence. Over the course of his almost two-decade career, the filmmaker has undertaken a thorough investigation into the forms and politics of images amidst their power games, about what is seen and what has been made invisible, among material and memorial ruins interpolated in the editing room.
Presented by Mizna
Mizna is a critical platform for contemporary literature, film, art, and cultural production centering the work of Arab and Southwest Asian and North African artists. For more than twenty years, we have been creating a decolonized cultural space to reflect the expansiveness of our community and to foster exchange, examine ideas, and engage audiences in meaningful art.