19th Arab Film Festival Closing Night

SCREENS AT THE WALKER ART CENTER

Sunday, September 28 at 7:00 PM

Mizna’s 19th Twin Cities Arab Film Festival holds its closing day with a pair of special screenings and a closing reception co-presented with and at the Walker Art Center.

This special closing night screening is followed by a Q+A with the director of the film, Hala Elkoussy.

ABOUT THE FILM

Following her distinctive debut, Cactus Flower (2017), Hala Elkoussy’s second feature, East of Noon, bends and blends genres, resulting in a satirical, contemporary fable, shot on 16mm. Set somewhere in Egypt, between a gritty industrial town and an imaginary seascape, Elkoussy’s film constructs a hyperreal world steeped in classic Egyptian film references, theatrical tableaux, and experimental sound compositions. Eccentric, rebellious, and unlike any film you’ve seen before, the world in East of Noon appears to exist outside of time, and it uses its unique aesthetic and unconventional storytelling methods to examine the inner workings of a dysfunctional and failing government as well as the ways that power limits our incentive to imagine and create a better world.

Content warning: this film contains depictions of assault, implicit sexual violence, and self harm.

FILMMAKER BIO

Hala Elkoussy (Egypt, 1974) is a visual artist who works across a variety of media: photography, video, installation, and sculpture. She has produced many short films that have screened in exhibitions and festivals around the world, including the Istanbul Biennial and the Tate Modern. In 2004, she cofounded Cairo Image Collective, the first space dedicated to the image in the region. She also established Fotomasr, an archive of Egyptian photographs from the 1800s to the 1970s. Her first feature film, Cactus Flower, received the Special Jury Award at the Aswan International Women’s Film Festival.

PRESENTED BY MIZNA

Mizna is a critical platform for contemporary literature, film, art, and cultural production centering the work of Arab and Southwest Asian and North African artists. For more than 25 years, Mizna has been creating a decolonized cultural space to reflect the expansiveness of our community and to foster exchange, examine ideas, and engage audiences in meaningful art.