December 16, 2025

Mizna Film Series 2026: Looking Forward, Looking Back

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.

Learn more about the Mizna Film Series here.

Tickets

In-person Trylon tickets: $10

JAN 28: STARS IN BROAD DAYLIGHT

(1988, DCP, 105m, Arabic w/ English Subtitles) dir. Ossama Mohammed
Set in a coastal village northwest of Damascus, this essential Syrian film traces the catastrophic dissolution of the Ghazi family as they prepare for a double wedding celebration. Their preparations for the festivities culminate in a pressure cooker of underlying resentments and stifled desires. A richly layered allegory for the Ba’athist regime, the family is dominated by tyrannical patriarch Abbas whose obsession with power and control over his sister’s marriage mirrors the broader oppressive political landscape. The village and wedding become political theatres to explore the illusion of freedom and belonging under dictatorship. Told through stark imagery and with terrifying intimacy, Stars in Broad Daylight is a biting polemic against totalitarianism, which has never screened in Syria.

Watch January 28, 2026, 7pm at the Trylon Cinema

APRIL 22: CHRONICLE OF THE YEARS OF FIRE

(1975, DCP, 177m, Arabic, French w/ English Subtitles) dir Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina
Burning with passion, poetry, and a nation’s fervent spirit of resistance, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s stirring revolutionary epic vividly dramatizes the pivotal decades leading up to Algeria’s War of Independence. The film depicts the “years of fire” through the harrowing saga of Ahmed (Yorgo Voyagis), a proud farmer seeking a dignified life, whose experience of brutal oppression and systemic injustice leads him, like so many others, to take a stand against French colonialism. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, this awe-inspiring landmark of Arab cinema is an at once personal and expansive vision of a country awakening from despair to build an unbreakable movement of liberation.

Print courtesy of Janus Films.

Watch on April 22, 2026 at 7pm at Trylon Cinema

JULY 22: 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.

Watch on July 22, 2026 at 7pm at Trylon Cinema

OCTOBER 28: FANGS (ANYAB)

(1981, DCP, 100m, Arabic, w/ English Subtitles) dir Mohammed Shebl. 
Egypt’s answer to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, this delirious musical-horror oddity follows two innocent lovers who stumble into a nightclub of disco-dancing vampires, rock ‘n’ roll numbers, and campy bloodsucking mayhem. Cairo meets Transylvania in a cult curio that’s equal parts satire, singalong, and surreal nightmare. Mohammed Shebl’s 1981 adaptation isn’t just a cult classic, Fangs (Anyab) is also an astute commentary on the Egyptian socio-political climate all wrapped up in disco, glam, and vampire fangs! —Cultpix

Watch on October 28, 2026 at 7pm at Trylon Cinema