Events

Event details

In 2026, Mizna celebrates the twentieth edition of our flagship program, the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival. We mark this milestone with a year-long, multi-venue program, Looking Forward, Looking Back, which centers images from the history of SWANA filmmaking and our past festivals. Through this framework, we confront the visual record, demanding more from the archive than a sentimental look at the past. While SWANA films have been continually plundered, twisted, and aligned to colonial narratives, this year, Mizna’s film programming considers what overlooked, liberatory lessons the past might offer the present and future. With this goal in mind, we present selections by former Mizna festival curators alongside new restorations of SWANA cinema, drawing radical new meanings from the objects that remain.

Join us on July 22, 2026 at 7pm for the third screening of our quarterly film program, Mizna Film Series, presenting the newly restored Phantom Beirut by Ghassan Salhab.

WHEN: July 22, 2026 at 7pm
WHERE: Trylon Cinema
TICKETS

ABOUT PHANTOM BEIRUT

(1998, DCP, 120m, Arabic w/ English Subtitles) dir Ghasan Salhab. Ghassan Salhab’s often overlooked debut feature depicts Lebanon at the end of the 1980s. The film follows Khalil, who, after faking his death ten years earlier, returns to Beirut under a new identity and confronts the old friends and comrades he left behind. A haunting exploration of official silences and collective amnesia in the country, Phantom Beirut portrays the impacts of conflict, return, and repair.

This timely restoration will screen as part of our July focus on Lebanon, with screenings at Trylon and the Main Cinema.

NOTES ON THE RESTORATION:
New 2K Restoration by Préludes in collaboration with Les films de l’Altaï funded by CNC. A Several Futures Release. Special thanks to Graham Carter.