October 2021
Moumen Smihi, Mohammad Malas
RADICAL MODERNISMS: RETRACING ARAB AND NORTH AFRICAN FILM HISTORIES is a two-part program curated by Peter Limbrick, Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz and author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi. This program addresses aesthetic and cultural experiments that emerged in Arab and North African cinema from the 1960s, experiments…
Mostafa Derkaoui, Ahmed Bouanani
September 2021
Mohamed Soueid, Walid Raad, Jayce Salloum
RECONSTRUCTING HISTORIES examines the role of the documentary in representing the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) through the experimental works of three important Lebanese post-war artists/filmmakers: Walid Raad, Jayce Salloum, and Mohamad Soueid. The Lebanese Civil War officially ended after the 1989 Taif Accord, granting amnesty to those who committed war crimes, allowing these same figures to…
August 2021
Carol Mansour, Charbel Samuel Aoun, Wael Noureddine, Ali Cherri
Marking the one-year anniversary of the devastating Beirut blast, this program of films and videos from Lebanese artists and filmmakers conveys their direct experience assimilating the overwhelming experience of loss and trauma. Two of the works are a response to the Beirut blast, which shook the city on August 4, 2020, while the other two…
July 2021
Larissa Sansour, Meriem Bennani, Mariam Mekiwi
Disrupted Pasts, Displaced Futures is a selection of moving image works by contemporary artists from the Middle East and North Africa, blending science fiction, arabfuturism, and magic realism to tackle themes of displacement, migration, and climate crisis. Responding to an unstable present through the lens of the future, these alternate realities resist hegemonic narratives and open…
