Upcoming Events
This year, 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.
Twin Cities Arab Film Fest
Established in 2003, Mizna’s Twin Cities Arab Film Festival (TCAFF) debuts independent narrative, documentary, and experimental features and short films from more than fifteen Arabic-speaking countries and their diasporas. The festival puts SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) filmmakers at all career stages in critical dialogue with one another and with Mizna audiences. Each year, Minnesota and US audiences gather to enjoy the varied ways that SWANA artists represent and montage their social realities.
Festival Archive
Festival Tours
Insurgent Transmissions
Insurgent Transmissions is an ongoing quarterly film program. Throughout 2026, Insurgent Transmissions will present quarterly films programmed by former Mizna festival curators, individually chosen because of their significance in Mizna’s curatorial history and impact on the landscape of SWANA filmmaking.
Mizna Film Series
The Mizna Film Series is an ongoing quarterly program of films presented at The Trylon. This series includes classic, contemporary, and repertory works from and connected to the SWANA region.
Syria on Screen
Co-presented by Mizna, CISPOS, and From the Periphery Media Collective, this ongoing series aims to provide space for our local community to gather, have critical dialogues, and raise funds for grassroots efforts in Syria.
Sudan on Screen
Sudan on Screen is an emergent series featuring archival Sudanese films and post-screening discussions, highlighting the history and current situation in Sudan.
Arab Film Fest Tulsa
In collaboration with the Tulsa Artist Fellowship and Circle Cinema, the Arab Film Fest Tulsa is an annual mini iteration of our flagship program in Tulsa, Oklahoma, since 2020. This festival is a unique opportunity to offer films that engage with complex, authentic narratives from a spectrum of contemporary SWANA life and intersecting nationalities in the region. 2026 dates TBA.
Arab Film Fest Collab
The Arab American National Museum (AANM), the Arab Film and Media Institute (AFMI), ArteEast, and Mizna presented the Arab Film Fest Collab in 2020 and 2022. The AFFC is a collectively produced virtual film festival, screening independent Arab cinema for audiences across the United States.