An Arabic-language opera about mourning and inherited trauma. Performed by Palestinian soprano Nour Darwish, it fuses Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder with Masha’al, a traditional Palestinian song.

As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night

And on a Different Note is a navigation of an attempt to carve out a personal space amid an inescapable sonic shield created primarily by prime time political talk shows with their indistinguishable, absurd and at times undecipherable rhetoric/noises. Equally repulsive and addictive, these noises travel across geographies gradually constituting an integral part of a self-created map of exile.

English

And on a Different Note

O, Persecuted turns the act of restoring Kassem Hawal’s 1974 Palestinian Militant film, Our Small Houses, into a performance possible only through film. One that involves speed, bodies, and the movement of the past into a future that collides ideology with escapism.

O, Persecuted

O, Persecuted turns the act of restoring Kassem Hawal’s 1974 Palestinian Militant film, Our Small Houses, into a performance possible only through film. One that involves speed, bodies, and the movement of the past into a future that collides ideology with escapism.

In this resonant work, Palestinian-born video and performance artist Mona Hatoum tries to overcome the effects of distance, and reflects on geography represented in exile due to war, and on the psychological distance represented in each one’s approach to her womanhood. The video beautifully weaves personal images and audio recordings of a very intimate nature, binding the personal with the political. Reading aloud from letters sent by her mother in Beirut, Hatoum creates a visual montage reflecting her feelings of separation and isolation from her Palestinian family. The personal and political are inextricably bound in a narrative that explores personal and family identity against a backdrop of traumatic social rupture, exile and displacement.

Measures of Distance

Assassinated Lebanese intellectual Mahdi Amel — often dubbed “the Arab Gramsci” — famously said: “He who resists is never defeated.” What use is his thought to us today, and what is our responsibility as image makers to Gaza?

Mahdi Amel in Gaza: On the Colonial Mode of Production

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. “It’s going to be quite soundless; the roar of our aircraft is drowning everything else. We are running straight into the most gigantic of soundless fireworks in the world, and here we go to drop our bombs.”––Kamal Aljafari

Paradiso, XXXI, 108

“It’s going to be quite soundless; the roar of our aircraft is drowning everything else. We are running straight into the most gigantic of soundless fireworks in the world, and here we go to drop our bombs.” ––Kamal Aljafari

United States of America

From The Cinema Issue - shorts segment

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Hadi Moussally

Dr. Wessam Elmeleigi

Suzannah Mirghani

MiznaTwin Cities Arab Film Festival2446 University Ave W, Suite 115Saint Paul, MN 55114USA

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TCAFF 2023 is a film festival celebrating independent Arab/SWANA cinema for audiences across the United States and in-person in Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN, striving to represent a diverse range of stories from the SWANA region and beyond.

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