Events

Event details

Mizna’s Twin Cities Arab Film Festival is a place to see contemporary films from the SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) region, films that are relevant to our communities in the Twin Cities and around the world. This year, we also aim to create a space for BIPOC and SWANA filmmakers by offering a workshop to discuss best practices, common questions, and works-in-progress. Living in diaspora can make it difficult to find filmmakers with similar questions and to receive feedback from folks within the community; many of us often rely on non-SWANA and non-BIPOC spaces for dialogue and critique. Mizna invites filmmaker and educator Fatima Wardy to create such spaces for SWANA and BIPOC filmmakers. During the 2024 Twin Cities Arab Film Festival, selected filmmakers will come together for a two-day symposium that addresses the various challenges that filmmakers face. Participants will present finished, incomplete, partial, or potential projects to one another to receive feedback and advice on how to take the project to the next level.

All film practitioners are invited to participate––i.e., writers, directors, producers, actors, editors, production designers, cinematographers, production crew etc. We hope that wide inclusion will both spark future collaborations amongst participants and acknowledge the value that these folks might have in critiquing works-in-progress.

Terms such as SWANA or MENA can be useful to lay the foundation for dialogues of solidarity across shared geographical regions, but they sometimes have their limits too. Members of East African communities traditionally do not fit into these categories, despite the fact that their diasporas have long-standing roots and patterns of migrations in and out of SWANA countries. In the spirit of inclusion, the organizers of this workshop therefore invite all BIPOC filmmakers based in the Twin Cities and beyond, to express their interest in taking part.

The workshop will take place over two afternoons on Thursday, Sept. 26, and Friday, Sept. 27, 12–3pm. This workshop is free to attend.

If you’re interested in participating or have any questions, please reach out to Ahmed AbdulMageed (ahmed@mizna.org) or Michelle Baroody (michelle@mizna.org) for more information.

To apply, please fill out this Google form. It should take less than 30 minutes to complete.

This workshop is presented in partnership with FilmNorth.

Workshop Objectives and Goals

• A tailored series of sessions that responds directly to the needs of the Twin Cities filmmaking community
• Participants will expand their network of diaspora filmmakers in the Twin Cities and beyond. They will discover new peers and potential collaborators to utilize for future projects as well as build a network of solidarity.
• Opportunities for peer-to-peer learning will be created through the form of feedback sessions on works-in-progress. This helps individual filmmakers build confidence in their work, while also helps them to recognise the value of other film practitioners in the room who pitch them good notes.
• Improved feedback etiquette––not everyone went to film school and spent years workshopping scripts and rough cuts and knows how to offer critiques in a patient manner. Even those of us who did go to film school often spent a lot of time trying to explain the meaning of their work to the non-SWANA people in the room. We have the opportunity to create a space that is an antidote to that, where participants can be liberated to take creative risks in their work and push themselves out of their comfort zone.
• This will be an inclusive environment that brings together a diverse array of film practitioners. Diversity here is defined both in terms of ethnic background of participants, as well as their areas of focus. Not just writers, directors and documentary makers – but actors, production designers and below-the-line crew too. Even if they are performing more technical roles, these film practitioners have storytelling craft too and participants will be encouraged to not discount that.
• Participants will learn how to take the next level up in their career.
• Fun! Last but not least, this should be a joyful experience that fosters connections that will last for years to come.

About Fatima Wardy

Fatima Wardy is a Sudanese and British filmmaker based in Austin, Texas. Her work delves into the impact of displacement on the African diaspora, examining moments of connection and dis-connection in the daily lives of immigrants. She directed the short film Hair Care, which is currently on its festival run, scooping up a SXSW Special Jury Award in the Texas Shorts category. Her forthcoming film White Musk was selected for the 2024 edition of the Short Form Station Lab at the Berlinale Talents Summit.

In 2023 she was awarded a development grant by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) for her documentary feature titled The Love Marriage––an archive-based film that utilizes the filmmaker’s personal photographs and family oral histories to explore the modernisation of Sudan in the 1980s and the genesis of the Omar al-Bashir dictatorship. Currently, she is an MFA Candidate in Film and Media Production at the University of Texas at Austin, where her studies have been supported by a Fulbright Award and a Pigott/BAFTA Scholarship