18th Arab Film Festival

SCREENS AT THE WALKER ART CENTER

Sunday, September 29 at 3:30pm

Mizna’s 18th Twin Cities Arab Film Festival closes with a pair of special screenings and a reception co-presented with the Walker Art Center. 

“Filmmakers make the light. There is always poetry in images and images in poetry: imagination, desire, steadfastness, and liberation are entangled into material manifestations of scenes, vignettes, soundscapes, lightscapes, stillness, and rhythm.” —Nasrin Himada

Curator Nasrin Himada imagines Palestinian and Indigenous artists’ films and videos as proposals for possible worlds, made up of dreams, love for the land, and liberation. The program includes works by Kamal Aljafari, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, NIC Kay, Rhayne Vermette, Sky Hopinka, Tacita Dean, and Tiffany Sia.

Following the screening, Himada and Anishinaabe-kwe curator Wanda Nanibush will discuss their values-grounded approach to working with artists and ideas of land rights, liberation, and Indigenous self-determination.

ABOUT THE FILMS

Green Ray

Dir. Tacita Dean • 2001 • 16mm • 3 min

"When the sun sets into a clear crisp horizon, and when there is no land in front of you for a few hundred miles, and no distant moisture that could become, at the final moment, a backlit cloud that obscures the opportunity, you stand a very good chance of seeing the green ray." –Tacita Dean

Lore

Dir. Sky Hopinka • 2019 • USA • English • HD Video • 10 min

Images of friends and landscapes are cut, fragmented, and reassembled on an overhead projector as hands guide their shape and construction in this film stemming from Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia). The voice tells a story about a not-too-distant past, a not-too-distant ruin, with traces of nostalgia articulated in terms of lore. 

Paradiso, XXXI, 108

Dir. Kamal Aljafari • 2022 • Palestine/Germany • 2022 • Hebrew with English Subtitles • 2K Digital • 18 min

"It’s going to be quite soundless; the roar of our aircraft is drowning everything else. We are running straight into the most gigantic of soundless fireworks in the world, and here we go to drop our bombs." –Kamal Aljafari

Black Rectangle

Dir. Rhayne Vermette • 2013 • Canada • 16 mm - Digital • 2 min

This film documents a tedious process of dismantling and reassembling 16 mm found footage. The film collage intimates functions of a curtain, while the recorded optical track describes the film’s subsequent destruction during its first projection.

wait, wait, wait (Renegade)

Dir. NIC Kay • 2022 • USA • English • 2 min

The #Renegade dance trend that took over social media in 2019 was based on a chopped and looped sound sample of the song "Lottery" by K Camp. The dance was initially choreographed and posted on Instagram by Jaliah Harmon, but it gained fame when White TikTok influencers co-opted and popularized it. 

Only the Beloved Keep Our Secrets

Palestine • 2016 • Single channel video • 10 min

This film weaves together a fragmented script sampled from online recordings of everyday ritual and performance and everyday erasures. Collected over the last five years, mostly from Palestine, moments from this material appear as moving layers with images building in density on top of each other, obscuring what came before in an accumulation of constant testament and constant erasure. 

What Rules the Invisible

Dir. Tiffany Sia • 2022 • USA • English and Cantonese • Video • 10 min

This film upends archival travelogue footage shot in Hong Kong. Spanning reappropriated amateur footage across the 20th century, the sojourner’s gaze—distanced, distorted and even voyeuristic—shows tropes and patterns. The same shots repeat across decades, from landscape to cityscape to street scenes. Sometimes the footage reveals more about the traveler himself. 

FILMMAKER BIOS

Kamal Aljafari is a Palestinian filmmaker. He attended the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and now lives in Berlin, Germany. His most recent work, Paradiso, XXXI, 108, premiered at Corti d’Autore in the Locarno Film Festival 2022. He just completed A Fidai Film and is preparing a fiction film to be shot in Jaffa.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body, and virtuality. 

NIC Kay is a dancer, performer, conceptual choreographer, and all-around artist. Using creative movement, performing arts history, and performance art theory, they explore the themes of relationality and yearning in their work.

Rhayne Vermette is an artist and filmmaker born in Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes, Manitoba. Her filmmaking practice has been described as opulent collages of fiction, animation, documentary, re-enactments, and divine interruption. She lives in Winnipeg.

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) b. Ferndale, Washington, is currently based in Vancouver, BC, and Milwaukee, WI. He studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His work centers around personal positions of Indigenous landscape, language as containers of culture, and the play between the known and the unknowable.

Tacita Dean was born in Canterbury, England. She attended the Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall, England, the Supreme School of Fine Art in Athens, Greece, and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She has produced works in various media, including sculpture, photography, and woodwork. Some of her unique and renowned creations, however, have involved the use of film as portrait. By projecting a series of frames, each blown up and lit to her own specifications, Dean makes the celluloid film itself the subject over and above the action in the film.

Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker, and writer living in New York. Her work explores the politics and relations of media circulation and considers how material cultures, particularly print and film/video, trace and enable power, governance, and perception, and how such forces play out and construct imaginaries of place, especially Hong Kong. Sia has directed several short films, including Never Rest/Unrest (2020), Do Not Circulate (2021), and What Rules the Invisible (2022), which have screened at New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight, Flaherty Film Seminar, and elsewhere.

PRESENTED BY MIZNA

Celebrating 25 years in 2024, 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 twenty years, we have 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.