Join us for this year’s Turath Film Event presenting experimental works on indigeneity and displacement through representations of landscapes and their ecologies.
Join us for the 9th edition of the New York Forum of Amazigh Film - "Memory & Resilience." Sign up now for the upcoming screening.
Join us for the New York Premiere of May Masri’s film Beirut: Eye of the Storm
Inspired by true events, FARHA tells the story of a young Palestinian girl whose dream changes from seeking an education in the city to surviving Al-Nakba in Palestine 1948.
October 1st, 10:00am - 5:30pm
Join us for a full day of film screenings and talks that will engage with past and present trauma in Lebanon, an imagined future, and a dream space of “where to?"
May 20 - May 26
Book your free or discounted tickets to stream or attend an in-person screening of Up to G-Cup at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.
Screening of Elyes Baccar’s award winning film, Tunis by Night, followed by a discussion with the Director, Elyes Baccar and Columbia lecturer, Dr. Rym Bettaieb.
This panel will engage five emerging LGBTQ filmmakers from the Arabic speaking region in a meaningful discussion on the role of Arab queer cinema in shaping and giving voice to the Arab LGBT community. The panel will explore how emerging Arab queer cinema is engaging with the region’s turbulent socio-political arena, while drawing on the filmmakers’ personal journeys, creative expressions and motivations. Recognizing the agency of Arab queer filmmakers through cinema, the panel will explore how LGBTQ issues are being represented in popular Arabic culture, and how their work is being received by local and regional audiences.
Panelists
Anthony Chidiac
Anthony is an independent film artist based in Beirut. His works include Equal men and Maman, non, merci. His latest work, Room for a man,premiered at the Montreal International Documentary Festival where it was awarded the grand prize for international competition, as well as being awarded best film in Queer Lisboa and Queer Hamburg in 2018.
Cyrine Hammemi
Cyrine is a 25-year-old audiovisual production graduate student and human rights activist based in Tunisia. In 2019, she coordinated Mawjoudin (We Exist) in Tunisia, the only queer film festival in the Arab world. Cyrine is an active member of Mawjoudin’s grassroots organization.
Sam Abbas
Sam is an Egyptian writer, director and producer. He and his business partner launched the first ever Arab-based LGBTQ-focused production company, ArabQ Films, during the 2018 Berlin film festival. The Weddingwas his debut feature film and the first ArabQ title. Sam is currently working on his new feature, Alia’s Birth.
Rolla Selbak
Rolla is a writer/director of film and TV drama and a Sundance alumna. Her most recent credits include American Paradise, Three Veils, and Choke. She has served on the Board of Directors of Outfest, home to the largest LGBT International Film Festival in the world.
Moderated by
Samar Habib
Samar Habib is a scholar of gender and sexuality in the Arab world. Her seminal publications on same-sex love and desire among women in the Middle East and North Africa include Female Homosexuality in the Middle East (2007), Arabo-Islamic Texts on Female Homosexuality (2008), and the two-volume, edited collection Islam and Homosexuality (2009).
Introduction by
Safwan M. Masri
Safwan Masri is Executive Vice President for Global Centers and Global Development at Columbia University and a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. A scholar on education and contemporary geopolitics and society in the Arab world, his work focuses on understanding the historic, postcolonial dynamics among religion, education, society, and politics. He is the author of Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly (Columbia University Press, 2017).
See more information and register here.
The New York Forum of Amazigh Film will celebrate the 5th Annual Amazigh Film Festival exploring North African Identitites.
Sponsored by LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, LaGuardia Community College, International Oriental Film Festival of Geneva, and Columbia University Middle East Institute.
Reserve your seat here.
An evening with acclaimed Syrian filmmaker Ossama Mohammed presenting Silvered Water: Syria Self-Portrait, “a rare poetic work that powerfully expresses the humanity and perseverance of Syrians, as it explores the topography of their country torn by civil war,” and a selection form an earlier short Step by Step. “A frightening, captivating and insightful portrait of how the Baath regime transformed generations of peasants into citizen-soldiers and sent the poor in droves to provincial cities as migrant laborers.”
Reception to follow.
Sponsored by: Columbia Global Centers, SIPA MENA Forum, Middle East Institute, and ArteEast.
All events are free and open to the public.
Thursday, April 11, 2019
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Location: Schermerhorn Hall, Columbia University 1180 Amsterdam Ave, Room 612
Paper Boat (2017) directed by Mahmoud Abu Ghalwa.
A shelter in Gaza during a bombing. A young couple waits in the small claustrophobic room. She is pregnant, but how can she give life to a human being in these conditions? The future father is lost in the memories of his childhood. A reflection on freedom, slavery and surrender, sustained by a pressing emotional tension. Director in attendance.
Degrade (2015) directed by Ahmad Abu Nasser and Mohammed Abu Nasser.
The Gaza Strip today. Christine’s beauty salon is crowded with female clients: a bitter divorcée, a religious woman, a woman addicted to prescription drugs and a young bride-to-be, among others. However, their leisure is disrupted when gunfire breaks out across the street. A gangland family has stolen the lion from Gaza’s zoo, and Hamas has decided it is time to settle old scores. Imprisoned in the salon, the women begin to unravel.
Friday, April 12, 2019
10:00 AM - Noon
Schermerhorn Hall, Columbia University, 1180 Amsterdam Ave, Room 612
Scenes from the Occupation in Gaza (1973) directed by Mustafa Abu Ali.
A work created from a French news report about the Gaza Strip that Abu Ali re-edited, adding additional footage and a new commentary. This is the only film produced by the Palestinian Cinema Group, a large collective of Palestinian and Arab filmmakers and artists who came together in 1973 for the purposes of creating a vibrant Palestinian revolutionary cinema.
Voices from Gaza (1989) directed by Antonia Caccia and Maysoon Pachachi.
Voices from Gaza is the first full-length documentary produced after the start of the first Palestinian intifada. With minimal commentary, it allows the people of Gaza - 70% of whom are refugees - to tell their seldom-heard story. In the film Palestinian men, women, and children speak frankly about the effect of Israel’s occupation on their lives, but also about their organized and empowering grassroots resistance to the occupation.
Gaza Diary (2001) directed by Taysir Batniji.
Combining still and moving images, Batniji’s short experimental film invites reflection on daily life and violence.
Al-Wafaa (2014) directed by Yassir Murtaja.
Al-Wafaa is the sole hospital in the Gaza Strip that serves the needs of the disabled. This is the story recounted by its staff and patients of their experience being shelled and bombed during the 2014 Israeli attack.
Shuja’iyah: Land of the Brave (2014) Directed by Hadeel Assali.
Shuja’iyah: Land of the Brave represents one filmmaker’s personal reflection on the meaning of “crimes against humanity” in the context of Israel’s ‘Operation Protective Edge’ waged in the Gaza Strip in 2014. Juxtaposing footage of her family filmed in the summer of 2013 against audio from the summer of 2014 Assali poses the question, when we say ‘crimes against humanity’, what ‘humanity’ are we talking about?” Director in attendance.
1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Dodge Hall, Columbia University, 2960 Broadway, Room 511
Daggit Gaza (2009) directed by Hadeel Assali and Iman Saqr.
Politics, food, and family are the topics of a phone conversation between Houston and Gaza that serves as voiceover commentary to the preparation of a spicy tomato salad.
Ouroboros (2017) directed by Basma Alsharif.
Ouroboros is acclaimed visual artist Basma Alsharif’s first feature film. This experimental film is an homage to the Gaza Strip and to the possibility of hope based on the eternal return. The film follows a man through five different landscapes, upending mass-mediated representation of trauma. The film is a journey outside of time, marking the end as the beginning and exploring the subject of the eternal return and how we move forward when all is lost.
4:00 PM- 6:00 PM
Dodge Hall, Columbia University 2960 Broadway, Room 511
Masterclass with Abdel Salam Shehada
Abdel Salam Shehada will talk about dreams and reality, images and imagination. He will share stories from his life, his beginnings in film as a cameraman and a visual album of his journey.
7:00 PM - 9:30 PM
Schermerhorn Hall, Columbia University 1180 Amsterdam Ave, Room 501
Samouni Road (2018) directed by Stefano Savona.
In the rural outskirts of Gaza City a small community of farmers, the Samouni extended family, is about to celebrate a wedding. This will be the first celebration since the latest war. Amal, Fuad, their brothers and cousins have lost their parents, their houses and their olive trees. The neighborhood where they live is being rebuilt. As they replant trees and plow fields, they face their most difficult task: piecing together their own memories. Through these young survivors’ recollections, Samouni Road conveys a deep, multifaceted portrait of a family before, during, and after the tragic event that changed its life forever. Winner of the L’Œil d’or prize for best documentary at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.
Saturday, April 13, 2019
10:00 AM - Noon
Dodge Hall, Columbia University, 2960 Broadway, Room 511
My 3 Dreams (2018) directed by Mohamed Nayef Ahmed Ali, Birzeit University.
In Gaza, Mohammed Mahani dreams of race cars, playing oud, and karate. 5.03. Director joining via videoconference.
Dema (2015) directed by Amjad M. A. Al Fayoumi. Al-Azhar University.
Too young to be a bride. 3.15.
Seekers for Life (2017) directed by Mahmoud Awad. Al-Aqsa University.
Gaza’s used clothing market. 4.32.
Private Number (2012) directed by Omar Elemawi, Al-Aqsa University.
An unexpected warning. 8.03.
We Love Life (2015) directed by Mohammed S. Ewais. Al-Aqsa University.
A portrait of graffiti artist Bilal Khaled in Gaza. 7.13. Director joining via videoconference.
Moving Dream (2012) directed by Alaa Alaloul. Birzeit University.
Nader dreams of going back to work. 2.00.
The Cage (2016) directed by Khaled Tuaima. Birzeit University.
The hazards of catching birds in Gaza. 6.42.
Parkour on the Rubble of Gaza (2014) directed by Khaled Tuaima. Birzeit University.
A team of athletic daredevils. 2.33.
1:00 PM-3:00 PM
Screening: Two Films by Abdel Salam Shehada
Dodge Hall, Columbia University 2960 Broadway, Room 511
Rainbow (2004) directed by Abdel Salam Shehada.
Of Rainbow, his film essay made in the aftermath of Israel’s 2004 attack on Gaza, Shehada says “These are people who have crossed my path...Some of these rose from among the debris. Carrying their tears, some were looking for answers to worries that haunted them...Others were exhausted by contemplating the reality ...They appeared like me...I used to love the camera and believe in what it could do to transfer the pain...forget sorrows, or may be promise of a better life.”
To My Father (2008) directed by Adel Salam Shehada.
“Those were the days when girls were prettier, when eyes were in all colours, without any colour. What is different now - the camera, or the eyes?” asks Abdel Salam Shehada’s poetic and mesmerizing homage to the studio photographers of the 1950’s - 70’s. Set partly in a refugee camp in Rafah, this is a remarkable look back at fifty years of Palestinian and Arab history, through photographs, reportage and the voices of these photographers today. Director in attendance.
4:00 PM- 6:00 PM
Academic Panel
Avery Hall, Columbia University, 1172 Amsterdam Ave, Room 114
Gaza Film Between the Event and the Everyday
Nadia Yaqub: Nadia Yaqub is Professor of Arab Culture at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Ghazza ala bali: Memory, Place and Trauma in Rashid Masharawi’s Haifa
Kamran Rastegar: Kamran Rastegar is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Tufts University
Documentary Art Films “About” Gaza
Samirah Alkassim: Samirah Alkassim is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Film and Video Studies at George Mason University. Moderated by Hamid Dabashi: Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Co-sponsored by Studio-X Amman and GSAPP
7:00 PM-9:00 PM
Closing Night
Lenfest Center for the Arts, 615 West 129th Street, Katharina Otto-Bernstein Screening Room
We Will Return (2018) by Ibrahim Ghunayim, Samir al-Burnu, Sami Shahadah, Arkan Gharib, and Faris Abdal-Malik.
A music video by rapper Ibrahim Ghunayim shot at the Great March of Return. Ghunayim has dedicated the song and video to the journalist Yaser Murtaja who was shot and killed by Israeli security forces while reporting on the March in April 2018.
Ambulance (2016) directed by Mohamed Jabaly.
A raw, first-person account of the Israeli war on Gaza in the summer of 2014. The filmmaker joins an ambulance crew as war approaches, looking for his place in a territory blockaded under siege, and films their harrowing and heroic lifesaving work. In response to the dark chaos of war, the filmmaker learns to rely on the ambulance captain and crew, who in turn support him to make a film that expresses both the trauma and hope of the Palestinians of Gaza. Director in attendance. Advisory: Graphic war violence.
9:00 PM-10:00 PM
Reception
Jerome L. Greene Science Center 3227 Broadway
Join us for a closing reception at Dear Mama Coffee’s location in the New Manhanttanville campus. It is in the southwest corner of the Jerome L. Greene Science Center’s ground floor, facing the Lenfest Center for the Arts. Copies of Nadia Yaqub’s book “Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution” will be available for sale at the opening screening.
Persian films with English subtitles
Every Monday evening at 6:15 PM
Persian films with English subtitles
Every Monday evening at 6:15 PM
Knox Hall, Room 208
606 W 122nd Street
New York, NY
Film Screening: The Tenants (1986) by Dariush Mehrjuyi
Persian films with English subtitles
Every Monday evening at 6:15 PM
With exceptional archival materials and many interviews (Algeria, France, Italy, United-States) Malek Bensmaïl’s documentary about Gillo Pontecorvo’s legendary 1965 film, The Battle of Algiers, will give us, sixty years after, a strong look back at this film halfway between history and legend.
The black and white newsreel-style film caused a sensation. Effectively banned in France until 1971, the film took on mythical status in Algeria, where it was screened each year on television to commemorate the country’s independence.
Screening and discussion with filmmaker Malek Bensmaïl, in conversation with Madeleine Dobie and Mohamed Amer Meziane.
Algerian documentary filmmaker Malek Bensmaïl set up his camera in the newsroom of the famous daily paper El Watan, the spearhead of the Algerian independent press, to film the procedures and thought processes behind journalism during the last presidential election. Accommodated since Algeria’s Bloody Decade of the 1990’s in the “House of the Press,” the journalists of the famous daily newspaper El Watan await the completion of their new offices, a symbol of their independence.
Tamer El Said’s ambitious debut feature tells the fictional story of a filmmaker from downtown Cairo played by Khalid Abdalla (The Kite Runner, United 93, Green Zone, The Square) as he struggles to capture the soul of a city on edge while facing loss in his own life. Shot in Cairo, Beirut, Baghdad and Berlin during the two years before the outbreak of revolution in Egypt, the film’s multi-layered stories are a visually rich exploration of friendship, loneliness and life in cities shaped by the shadows of war and adversity.
A showcase of contemporary feature, documentary, and short films by and about the Amazigh people of North Africa and in the diaspora. Through pre- and post-screening Q & As, live performances, and exhibitions of art and artifacts, the New York Forum of Amazigh Film seeks to disseminate Amazigh cinema and promote an understanding of the unique history, culture, and language of Amazigh peoples in North Africa and in the diaspora.
Film screening and Q&A with Avi Mograbi, director, and Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Profesor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literatures.
Introduction by Brinkley Messick, director of the Middle East Institute.
Avi Mograbi and Chen Alon meet African asylum-seekers in a detention facility in the middle of the Negev desert where they are confined by the state of Israel. What leads African refugees to leave everything behind and go towards the unknown? Why does Israel refuse to take into consideration the situation of the exiled, thrown onto the road by war, genocide and persecution? Can the Israelis working with the asylum seekers put themselves in the refugees' shoes?
You can watch the Q&A session here.
Ghost Hunting. A film by Raed Andoni.
Screening and Q&A with the director and Professor James Schamus.
Katharina Otto-Bernstein Screening Room, Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University
Director Raed Andoni places a newspaper advertisement in Ramallah. He is looking for former inmates of the Moskobiya interrogation centre in Jerusalem. In his ad he asks that the men should also have experience as craftsmen, architects or actors. After a casting process that almost feels like role play, he arranges for a replica of the centre’s interrogation rooms and cells to be built to scale inside a hall – under close supervision from the former inmates and based on their memories. In this realistic setting the men subsequently re-enact their interrogations, discuss details about the prison, and express the humiliation they experienced during their detention. Using techniques that are reminiscent of the so-called ‘theatre of the oppressed’ they work together to dramatise their real-life experiences. Their reconstruction brings long repressed emotions and undealt with trauma to the fore. Working on the film takes its toll on the men – both physically and mentally. The director also appears in front of the camera; not only is he creating a stage for his protagonists, he is also coming to terms with his own fragmented memories of imprisonment in Moskobiya thirty years previously.
The film Looted and Hidden focuses on a number of groundbreaking institutions that were plundered: The Palestine Research Center, the Palestinian Cinema Institution (PCI) and the Cultural Arts Center (CAS) of the PLO. These bodies were among the first to document Palestinian existence and to preserve, research and chart the visual and written Palestinian history from the late 1960s onward. Looted and Hidden , the first film devoted to the subject, follows pioneering, bold, and idealistic creators and directors and the archives they built, focusing mainly on the cinematic enterprise created by the CAS and PCI. Tracing their pillaging, administration and control by Israel - looting, censorship, denial of access, and erasure - the film raises questions about archival institutions in areas of conflict and points, as in detective work, to the need to dig into the invisible and hidden in order to reveal what has been erased or rewritten.
The Narrow Streets of Bourj Hammoud is a 72-minute experimental non-fiction film about a working-class suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, called Bourj Hammoud, made as a collaboration between anthropologist and filmmaker Joanne Nucho and Lebanese artist Rosy Kuftedjian.
With Filmmaker Nefin Dinç.
Introduction by Christine Philliou
Associate Professor at the Department of History, Columbia University
"The Other Town" is a documentary film about Turks and Greeks and the source of stereotypes, misunderstandings and prejudices against the "Other." It is about how the stereotypes and misunderstandings are perpetuated in education in a broader sense in Greece and Turkey countries. In this film, the filmmakers have collaborated with the writer Hercules Millas to see where these prejudices are still coming from even though the last war between the two nations took place about a 100 years ago. They filmed the national celebrations, religious ceremonies and history lessons in both countries throughout a year to find an answer to this question.
The film has won the "Audience Award" at Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival and the "Best Historical Documentary" at Greek Film Festival, Chicago.
To find more information on the film, and watch the trailer, click here.
Sponsored by the Middle East Institute, the Program in Hellenic Studies, and the Harriman Institute
Please join us for a screening and discussion of five short films by up-and-coming Armenian filmmakers Ophelia Harutyunyan, Jesse Soursourian, Viktorya Aleksanyan, Eric Shahinian, and Anahid Yahjian, followed by a Q&A with the directors moderated by Raffi Asdourian (from A&E, Sundance Channel).
This event is free and open to the public. Food and refreshments provided.
This event is organized by the Columbia graduate student group OASIES (Organization for the Advancement of Studies of Inner Eurasian Societies), and sponsored by the Armenian Society of Columbia University, the Harriman Institute, the Middle East Institute, the Kurdish Studies Student Association, and the Armenian General Benevolent Union.
Kamran Shirdel is considered one of Iran's most influential documentary filmmakers.Women's Prison (1966), Tehran is the Capital of Iran (started in 1966, but finished in 1980), The Red Light District (1967-80) and The Night It Rained (1967) are among his most well-known films made during the Pahlavi era. Throughout the 70s and 80s, he directed a substantial number of commissioned industrial documentaries, many of them now considered as the classics of their genre in Iran, for their lyricism, abstraction, and irony.
For more information on Kamran Shirdel, please visit:http://bigstory.ap.org/article/noted-iranian-filmmaker-makes-first-us-visit
Amir Naderi, now living in New York for more than two decades, has directed some of the most celebrated films in the history of Iranian cinema. After a number of years of working in the film industry as a still photographer, he made his feature debut Goodbye Friend in 1970, and in 1971 The Dead-end. Shot in stark black and white, these two films offered shockingly dark images of the urban sprawl that is the capital of Iran. The Runner made in 1984 became the first film from the post-revolutionary Iran to gain international acclaim. In 1993 Naderi made Manhattan by Numbers, his first film after moving to New York.
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. After finishing his first college degree at the University of Tehran he moved to the United States, where he received a dual Ph.D. in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Max Weber's theory of charismatic authority with Philip Rieff, the most distinguished Freudian cultural critic of his time. He engages with Iranian cinema by not only placing specific filmic texts within the larger socio-political context, and the Iranian intellectual history, but also by opening them to other artistic modes such as Persian poetry and fiction.
Free and open to the public.
This event is sponsored by Columbia's Middle East Institute, MESAAS, and School of the Arts (FILM).
Join Mario Rizzi for a screening of his documentary Al-Intithar (The Waiting), which narrates the life of a Syrian refugee mother and her three children in Jordan's Zaatari Camp. The short film was first shown at the Berlin Film Festival competition in February 2013. Film to be followed by a Q&A with the director.
This event is sponsored by the Middle East Institute.
Screening and Round-table discussion
Discussion moderated by:
Hadi Gharabaghi, New York University
With Panelists:
Agnes Devictor, University of Paris 1, Pantheon - Sorbonne
Jean-Michel FRODON, Slate.fr, Sciences Po Paris, St. Andrews
Alisa Lebow, University of Sussex
Mohammad Salemy, Independent Curator
Free and open to the public.
This event is sponsored by NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia's School of Art and Film, the Iranian Studies Initiative and the Middle East Institute.
Hosted by Professor Katherine Franke, Director of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law. Q&A with the Director, Ra'anan Alexandrowicz to follow the screening.
The Law in These Parts explores the four-decade-old Israeli military legal system in the Occupied Territories. Since Israel conquered the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 War, the military has imposed thousands of orders and laws, established military courts, sentenced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, enabled half a million Israeli "settlers" to move to the Occupied Territories and developed a system of long-term jurisdiction by an occupying army that is unique in the world.
The Law in These Parts examines this unprecedented and little-known story through testimonies of the military legal professionals, who were the architects of the system and helped run it in its formative years.
This event is part of the Milbank Faculty-Student Intellectual Life Series.
Sponsored by the Human Rights Institute and Middle East Institute.
View on YouTube.
Women Creating Change, a global initiative of the Center for the Study of Social Difference, is proud to invite you to a film screening and discussion, featuring acclaimed film director Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding, The Namesake, and now, The Reluctant Fundamentalist). Nair will be in conversation with Mabel Wilson, Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and Anupama Rao, Barnard Department of History.
Lila Abu-Lughod, Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference will moderate.
Click here for directions to Columbia University.
Seating is limited. Priority will be given to attendees with Columbia University IDs. Overflow space is available in 114 and 115 Avery Hall, and in Brownie's Cafe.
Sponsored by the Columbia University School of the Arts, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, the South Asia Institute, the Middle East Institute, and the Heyman Center for the Humanities
Join us for a screening of short films and videos followed by a Q & A with Syrian playwright and activist Mohammad Al Attar and theatre director Eyad Houssami, editor of Doomed by Hope: Essays on Arab Theatre.
This program of short films and videos by activists, amateurs, filmmakers, and citizen journalists offers intimate perspectives on the tragedy in Syria today. The videos include new material from film organizations such as Kayani for Audio-Visual Arts and Abounaddara, which broadcasts emerging talent directly online.
The title is a tribute to the late Syrian activist Basel Shehada, who was killed in May 2012 by government shelling on the besieged city of Homs, where he was filming and training other activists.
Sponsored by Alwan for the Arts and the Middle East Institute.
