Starting February 2023, Mizna Film Series transitions from a monthly film series to quarterly screenings. Screenings will take place exclusively in-person at the Trylon Cinema the fourth Wednesday of the months of February, May, August, and November. The 2023 Mizna Film Series highlights archival works and initiatives that document Palestine’s struggle for liberation. With quarterly screenings at the Trylon, the series presents rare and rediscovered Palestinian films as well as works produced by international collaborators and groups in solidarity with Palestine, like the Japanese Red Army and San Francisco Newsreel.

This season of Mizna Film Series will screen IN-PERSON ONLY at the Trylon Cinema in Minneapolis, MN.

Tickets + more info

The fall 2022 Mizna Film Series presents Arab Film Fest Extended. For those who can’t get enough of our annual Arab Film Fest, we are screening two new films fresh from Cannes at our monthly series in October and November.

In October we screen BOY FROM HEAVEN (dir. Tarik Saleh, 2022) and in November we present THE BLUE CAFTAN (dir. Maryam Touzani, 2022).

This season of Mizna Film Series will screen IN-PERSON ONLY monthly at the Trylon Cinema in Minneapolis, MN.

Tickets + more info

This summer’s series presents a retrospective of the collaborative film projects of Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. Often blending history and fantasy, Hadjithomas and Joreige’s work captures the mood and contradictions of Lebanon in the post-war moment. They use film to untangle representation from its referent, and their work engages the construction of memory from fact and fiction.  

In June, July, and August, Mizna will screen a curated selection of Hadjithomas and Joreige’s films, culminating in September with a filmmaker visit and discussion of their latest narrative feature Memory Box, which will open the sixteenth Twin Cities Arab Film Festival at the Walker Art Center. 

Tickets + more info

The spring 2022 season of the Mizna Film Series highlights recently restored works by Algerian filmmakers in diaspora. Curated by Mizna’s Film Programming Coordinator Ahmed Abdulmageed, the two-month segment presents films produced during the global leftist movements in the 1970s. This selection celebrates Algerian filmmakers and their collaborators, Farouk Beloufa, Djouhra Abouda, and Alain Bonnamy, who captured the political complexities of the moment, as well as the rhythmic and aesthetic make-up of their diasporas, by breaking away from traditional filmic forms.

April features Nahla (1979)––the only directorial endeavor of Farouk Beloufa––which follows an Algerian journalist in 1975 Beirut just as the Lebanese Civil War begins. In May, the series presents a retrospective of experimental films by Djouhra Abouda and Alain Bonnamy, whose works blend an avant-garde style with political activism.

Tickets + more info

To kick off the winter 2022 season, we present Route 181: Fragments of a Journey In Palestine-Israel, a three-part film with a focus on daily life in Palestine.

In the summer of 2002, Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi travel together from the south to the north of their country of birth; they traced their trajectory on a map and called it ROUTE 181. This virtual line follows the borders outlined in Resolution 181, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1947 to partition Palestine into two states.

As they travel, Khleifi and Sivan meet a multitude of characters, each of which has their own way of evoking the frontiers that separate them from their neighbors: concrete, barbed-wire, cynicism, humor, indifference, suspicion, aggression; frontiers have been built on the hills and in the plains, on mountains and in valleys but above all, in the collective unconscious of both societies.

Tickets + more info

To wrap of the 2021 season, we present the best of our Arab Film Fest: past and present. In October, Mizna Film Series screens Palestinian film Gaza Mon Amour (dir. Arab & Tarzan Nasser, 2020), which won the 2021 Twin Cities Arab Film Fest Audience Award for Best Feature Film. In November, we screen a program of shorts entitled Complicating Families, which presented a selection of the best short films from Mizna’s 2021 Arab Film Festival, including Darine Hotait’s Tallahassee, the audience award winner for Best Short Film.

For the final pick of the 2021 Mizna Film Series, we celebrate the “best of” Mizna’s film festival with a blast from TCAFF’s past. Bringing back one of our audience favorites from the first Arab film festival in 2003, we screen Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention in-person at the Trylon Cinema.

Tickets + more info

Encountering the real effects of destruction, the films in this series complicate the relationship between fact and fiction, using poetry and other forms of intermediality to witness what emerges from ruins. Beirut, a city that has often been the site of sectarian, colonialist, and imperialist violence, is a context which produces films that critically engage with images related to moments during, between, and after war and upheaval.

At the center of this series is a retrospective of several early films by Jocelyne Saab, who uses documentary form to demonstrate the effects of violence in Lebanon and to challenge dominant western media perceptions and practices of filming and exhibiting war in Beirut. This series coincides with and honors the one year anniversary of the devastating Beirut Port explosion through the celebration of Lebanese filmmaking.

The June program encompasses youth resistance movements and experiences in Beirut; featuring A Note on Jocelyne Saab and Screening Violence, a short essay by Michelle Baroody. The July program presents Jocelyne Saab’s Beirut Trilogy; featuring ‘You Have to Treat an Image Like it Never Existed:’ Jocelyne Saab’s Beirut Trilogy by Linda Mokdad and a discussion on Jocelyne Saab with Rayyane Tabet, Dalia Said Mostafa and Lamia Abukhadra. The August program explores post/protracted civil war filmmaking practices; featuring Mai Masri in conversation with Miriam Cooke. In September, we screen Birds of September by Sarah Francis.

Tickets + more info

The spring season of Mizna’s Film Series is focused around a theme of surveillance. The film selections depict, critique, and engage with the impacts and meaning of surveillance technologies––those we know about, those we only think we know about, and those we willingly participate in every time we pick up our devices, or indeed, move through the world. Acknowledging the realities of corporate and governmental forms of surveillance, violence, and control, these films also explore the banality of the modern surveillance state and our complicity within it.

We kick off our spring season in March with An Unusual Summer (2020) by Kamal Aljafari; featuring Life Must Be Disrupted In Order To Be Revealed, an essay by Lamia Abukhadra and a conversation between Kamal Aljafari and Kareem Estefan. The spring segment continues in April with Al Asleyeen (2017) by Marwan Hamed; featuring Al Asleyeen, an essay by Hazem Fahmy. In May we screen Empty Metal by Bayley Sweitzer and Adam Khalil; featuring a Q&A with filmmaker Adam Khalil.

Tickets + more info

We are proud to present two recently restored SWANA classics to kick off Mizna’s new monthly film series, starting with Soleil Ô (dir. Med Hondo, 1970), a Mauritanian Third Cinema classic; featuring Soleil Ô And A Transnational Third Cinema, an essay by Ahmed Abdulmageed.

Tickets + more info