April 22, 2026
On Maryam Tafakory
This absence, like the blank spaces in Zan newspaper, contains the potential for liberation. This absence leaves her films on the verge of collapse, but in doing so, it forces us to hold them together ourselves, and gives us space into which we project our desires, our visions of freedom. The silences in which the soul can take refuge.
Read More
July 27, 2021
‘You Have to Treat an Image Like it Never Existed’: Jocelyne Saab’s Beirut Trilogy
by Linda Mokdad
Linda Mokdad This text is presented as part of the Mizna Film Series, a monthly selection which expands our regular film programming to include screenings, critical essays, filmmaker interviews, and discussions exploring revolutionary forms of cinema from the SWANA region and beyond. With the nationalization of the Egyptian film industry under Nasser, Lebanon was expected to replace Egypt as a distribution center for the Arabic-speaking world. The Lebanese Civil War...
Read More
March 22, 2021
Life Must be Disrupted in Order to be Revealed: The Recording as Record and the Hyper-Surveilled Entity Not Meant to Exist in An Unusual Summer
A nylon bag dances across the gravel lot, crinkling, and the camera follows it. A gust of wind, caught on camera as a swirl of dust moving from right to left. Aljafari zooms in and follows the swirl, repeating the gesture a few times. Every day, at 5:13 am, a man in a checkered shirt walks across the lot to catch a bus.
Read More