Expired October 19, 2022 3:59 AM
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WHAT EXISTED YESTERDAY MIGHT DISAPPEAR TOMORROW

Curated by Hind Mezaina


The past haunts the present in this film program about photography and cinema, featuring four short films by Hisham Bizri, Akram Zaatari, Meyar Al Roumi, and Joana Hadjithomas/Khalil Joriege. These films delve into a distant or recent past and their consequences today on what was and what could have been.


WHAT EXISTED YESTERDAY MIGHT DISAPPEAR TOMORROW is co-presented by ArteEast and Tribe. This screening is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents over 17 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. In addition to the online screening on artearchive.org from October 13-18, the program will be screened in-person at Alliance Française in Dubai on October 12, with an introduction and post screening discussion with curator Hind Mezaina and Nezar Andary, professor of cinema and literature, curator of film and book festivals.

Asmahan, Hisham Bizri, (2006)

No dialogue


"Unlike most cinephiles, I've never been interested in the cult of the actress - or actor - until Hisham Bizri rendered actress-fascination palpable, even for me, in his "Asmahan". Reediting a 1944 Egyptian film starring this liberated-for-her-era Syrian actress-singer to center his 21-minute film poem around her, Bizri replaces the original narrative with sequences that show her gestures, or suggest the actress's life. Sometimes she seems passively acted upon, but more often she appears to stage-manage the action, the universe seeming to revolve around her. Bizri's work is an obsessive fever-dream not of a movie narrative but of an actress's presence; as in his great predecessor, Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart, his actress is presented as a world in herself, with a cosmos of both varied emotions and varying degrees of inscrutability contained in her face. Brief cutaways to animals and night in part pay homage to the surrealist heritage that influenced Cornell, but are also a testimony to Asmahan's magic as a generator of dreams."


- Fred Camper, Chicago, June 13, 2006



About the filmmaker


Hisham Bizri is a film director, writer, and producer born in Beirut, Lebanon. He started working in cinema as an assistant director to Raúl Ruiz in NYC and to Miklós Jancsó in Budapest.

Bizri has directed 29 short films and has written a number of screenplays adapted from Gilgamesh, Jorge Luis Borges, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Al-Tayyib Salih, and James Joyce. In 2021, he directed Elektra, his first feature film which he also wrote and co-produced with Mirna Shbaro in Beirut.


Bizri studied filmmaking in the US and taught at Boston, MIT, NYU, the University of Chicago, UC Davis, and the University of Minnesota, as well as in Lebanon, Korea, Japan, Ireland, France, and Jordan where he founded a number of filmmaking programs. Most recently, he has served as a tenured Professor of Filmmaking and Screenwriting at Brown University.


Bizri’s work has been shown in international venues including Sundance, Beirut, Oberhausen, Tribeca, VideoEx, Mizna, Montpelier, Athens, San Francisco, Pesaro, Moscow, Ismailia, 25FPS Croatia, Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts, and Abu Dhabi film festivals. He also exhibited at the Louvre, Institut du Monde Arabe, Cinémathèque Française, Centre Pompidou, MoMa, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Jeu de Paume, Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, Harvard and Anthology Film Archives (NY), among others.


He is recipient of awards such as the McKnight, Salomon, LEF, Jerome, Bogliasco, Rockefeller, Ford, Guggenheim, Cairo International Film Festival Special Jury Prize for best screenplay, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy. In 2017, he was awarded The Andrei Tarkovsky Prize for best director.


In 2005, Bizri co-founded The Arab Institute of Film in Jordan with the late Syrian filmmaker Omar Amiralay and Danish producer Jakob Høgel, with support from the International Media Support (Copenhagen) and the Ford Foundation (NYC). He served as Producer at Future TV (Beirut), Creative Director of Orbit Communications Company (Rome), and President & Creative Director of Levantine Films (NYC).

In 2019, he founded Mimera Films, his own film practice studio. Bizri is currently living in Berlin and working on Jesus of Nazareth, a feature film he adapted from a screenplay written by the Danish film director Carl Theodor Dreyer. His other directorial project is a feature film he wrote after James Joyce’s Ulysses.

  • Year
    2006
  • Runtime
    21 minutes
  • Country
    Lebanon
  • Filmmaker
    Hisham Bizri