Mizna’s 18th Twin Cities Arab Film Festival closes with a pair of special screenings and a reception (5:30–7 pm) catered by Baba’s.
“Filmmakers make the light. There is always poetry in images and images in poetry: imagination, desire, steadfastness, and liberation are entangled into material manifestations of scenes, vignettes, soundscapes, lightscapes, stillness, and rhythm.” —Nasrin Himada
Curator Nasrin Himada imagines artists’ films and videos as proposals for possible worlds made up of dreams, love for the land, and liberation. The program includes works by Kamal Aljafari, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, NIC Kay, Tiffany Sia, Rhayne Vermette, Sky Hopinka, and Tacita Dean.
Following the screening, Himada and Anishinaabe-kwe curator Wanda Nanibush will discuss their values-grounded approaches to working with artists and ideas of land rights, liberation, and Indigenous self-determination.
Program
Tacita Dean, The Green Ray, 2001, 16mm, 3 min.
Sky Hopinka, Lore, 2019, 10 min.
Tiffany Sia, What Rules the Invisible, 2022, 10 min.
Kamal Aljafari, Paradiso, XXXI, 108, 2022, 18 min.
Rhayne Vermette, Black Rectangle, 2013, 16mm, 2 min.
NIC Kay, wait, wait, wait (Renegade), 2022, 2 min.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Only the beloved keeps our secrets, 2016, 10 min.
Program length: 55 min.
Twin Cities Arab Film Festival: Closing Day
Showcasing contemporary cinema made by Arab and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) filmmakers, the full festival runs September 25–29 at the Main Cinema in Minneapolis. For schedule and festival pass information, visit mizna.org.
Bios
Nasrin Himada is a Palestinian curator and writer. Their practice is heavily influenced by their long-term friendships and many ongoing collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and poets. Nasrin’s recent project, For Many Returns, experiments with writing as an act dictated by love and typifies their current curatorial interests, which foreground desire, transformation, and liberation through many forms. Nasrin currently holds the position of Associate Curator at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University in Kingston (ON).
A woman-led contemporary arts organization for its 25 years, Mizna has promoted experimental approaches to art, literature, and film that question and expand the forms and conceptual frameworks of Arab and SWANA culture. The organization publishes a biannual print literary and art journal, Mizna, and Mizna Online, a digital platform for literary and multidisciplinary work reflecting critically on the current realities of the SWANA region and beyond. Mizna produces the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival, the largest and longest-running SWANA-centered film festival in the Midwest. Mizna also offers readings, film series, performances, public art commissions, and community events that have featured 1000-plus local and transnational writers, filmmakers, and artists.
Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-kwe image and word warrior, curator, and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation. She was the inaugural curator of Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario from 2016–2023. Nanibush has curated major exhibitions including Robert Houle’s Red Is Beautiful (2021) Rebecca Belmore’s Facing The Monumental (2018), Rita Letendre’s Fire and Light (2017), Sovereign Acts (2012, 2017, 2020), and Nanabozho’s Sisters (2019). She is the founder of aabaakwad, a gathering of Indigenous artists, curators, and thinkers that focuses on Indigenous-led conversation on Indigenous art. Nanibush’s art practice includes film and installation works, including Carrying 2010–2016 (2016) in the exhibition Unsettled Sites: Marian Penner Bancroft, Wanda Nanibush, Tania Willard at Simon Fraser University Gallery; the lyric film Arrivals and Departures (2012); LandMines (2011) in the exhibition Homeland In/Security by Jeff Thomas at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery; and the short drama film The Gift (2005). Her writing has been widely published in books, exhibition catalogues, and magazines.
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