20th Arab Film Festival

Thursday, September 24 at 5:30 PM

Minnesota Made: Shorts and Fragments presents films from local Arab, Muslim and SWANA artists working across artistic and visual media. This segment includes finished films, collaborations, and works-in-progress by image-makers from our local(ish) community.

A short discussion with the filmmakers will follow the screening. 

ABOUT THE FILMS

STARING CONTEST

Dir. Hend A. Al-Mansour • USA • 2026 • English • 2 min
This animated film depicts various psychological reactions that unfold as a young woman engages in a staring contest with an older man. The sequence invites viewers into a world of personal emotional interpretation.

FILMMAKER BIO

Hend Al-Mansour is a Saudi-born Arab American installation artist whose work draws on Islamic art, Arabic aesthetics, and narratives of Middle Eastern women. Her practice encompasses screen-printed textile environments, Arabic calligraphy, and shrine-like installations that merge contemporary Islamic art with feminist storytelling. She holds an MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and an MA in Art History from the University of St. Thomas. Her work has been recognized by the McKnight Fellowship, the Jerome Fellowship in Printmaking, and multiple Minnesota State Arts Board grants, and has been exhibited internationally.

RUUNTA

Dir. Abdilatif Hassen • USA • 2025 • Somali, English • 15 min
Ruunta, or “truth” in Somali, celebrates the nuanced lived experiences of the Somali community in Minneapolis, the challenges we face, the beauty within our connection with each other and the ancestors who guide us along the way. Ruunta follows a young Somali man torn between who he is expected to be and who he knows he is—in a city that knocks him down and lifts him up.

FILMMAKER BIOS

Abdilatif Hassen is a writer and director from Minneapolis. He is inspired by his community, and motivated to share stories that uplift each other. He created Ruunta with intention as a vulnerable, familiar story rooted in the complexity of Minneapolis, a place he cherishes, and that is too often misread by outsiders. Ruunta celebrates the nuanced truth of our city and our people.

Ryan Stopera is an award winning writer, director, photographer, producer and consultant based in Minneapolis. Rooted in relationships and trust, his work centers amplifying the stories every individual has to create connection, evoke critical conversations and build power.

1001 ARAB FUTURES

Dir. Sharon Mansur • USA • 2021 • English • 9 min
1001 Arab Futures contemplates imaginative visions, past reckonings, embodied truths and future potentials from the Arab region and diaspora. Occupation, pre-occupation, circulation, liberation…an invitation to glimpse into infinite new realms.

FILMMAKER BIO

Sharon Mansur (she/her) is a Lebanese American dance and interdisciplinary artist, educator, curator, and community mover and shaker based in Winona, Mni Sota Makoce/MN, Dakota homelands. Her creative practice offers immersive experiences rooted in body, imagination and environment. Sharon directs The Cedar Tree Project, amplifying creative voices from the Arab/SWANA diaspora and region to increase understanding, empathy, and solidarity through artistic exchange. She also curates SHIFT~ experimental performance salons to support hyperlocal, collaborative contemporary art happenings and conversations.

CORNERS: AN EVER SHIFTING LANDSCAPE

Dir. Loree Keushgerian • USA • 2026 • Armenian • 5 min
In exploring the shifting landscapes of corners—both physical and metaphorical—this autoethnographic research-based video delves into the complexities of Armenian Lebanese diasporic identity. Through the interplay of dissociation, externalization, and diasporic intimacy, these corners transform from spaces of neglect into sites of resistance, where identity is simultaneously fragmented and reconstructed.

FILMMAKER BIO

Loree Keushgerian is an Armenian Lebanese artist and student at Macalester College majoring in Media and Cultural Studies and Studio Art. Her discipline is majorly multimedia as it centers art as process and research. Interested in affect theory and love politics, Loree attempts to find the moments in the mundane that replicate the conditions of connection and survival in her practice.

WOMAN LAND

Dir. Yasmin Yassin • USA • 2025 • Somali, English • 11 min
In South Minneapolis, two young Somali sisters, Hafsa and Sumaya, run a secret matchmaking service, “Woman Land.” Set against the backdrop of a Minnesota winter, the film explores the constant tug-of-war young women today face between traditional parental pressure and the desire to find their own voice in the modern digital age.

FILMMAKER BIO

Yasmin Yassin is a Minneapolis-based filmmaker, photographer, and researcher whose work explores subcultures, womanhood, and the layered experiences of her East African diaspora community. Her visual style moves between tradition and modernity. Her first short, Dhaanto, about an East African dance troupe, was supported by the SPNN Fresh Vantage grant and screened at festivals in Minneapolis–St. Paul, New York, East Africa, and Canada. Her forthcoming short film, Call Me Back, is supported by the Jerome Foundation. She is currently writing her first feature film. She is the 2026 Mizna Jerome Fellow in filmmaking, part of the inaugural cohort.

RISE

Dir. WIDAD and Lars Kommienezuspadt • USA • 2024 • English • 5 min
Through the juxtaposition of language and images, this short documentary poem imagines a free Palestine. The film is a call to action, and it takes the audience on a tour of Palestine’s most beloved cities and towns, highlighting the unique qualities of each in the context of the ongoing occupation of Palestinian people and land. Making connections between Palestine and Minnesota, the film visualizes the links between our interconnected struggles.

FILMMAKER BIOS

Christine Yasmine-Widad Harb (WIDAD) is a Palestinian-Christian poet, lecturer, filmmaker, and essayist. Her writings have been included in the Guardian, Jewish Currents, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, SWANA Dyke, and more. She has a Master's of Community and Behavioral Health and is a physician in Family Medicine with an emphasis on gender affirming care, reproductive justice, social medicine, and global health.

Recipient of the Shireen Abu Akleh Award for Journalism, internationally recognized Minneapolis filmmaker Lars Kommienezuspadt's work has served as an unwavering historical record of popular resistance and community-led activism for over 25 years.

AFTER THE LAST RED SKY

Dir. Leila and Noelle Awadallah • Palestine, USA • 2025 • Arabic, English • 32 min
After the Last Red Sky is a dance performance and ritual gathering to hold the weight of—and imagine healing for—the Palestinian sky. A sky where violence hovers and falls on Palestinian bodies. A sky carrying a folk belief of a whale eating the lunar-eclipsing moon. Where dancing becomes a strategy capable of digging down into the rubble of decades of attacks on Palestinian Aliveness—to re-member our sky and to move through grief and rage together in community. This film is an archival record of the one-time, ephemeral live performance that happened in 2025 at Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem, Palestine. Created and performed by Body Watani Dance project sisters, Leila and Noelle Awadallah, along with collaborator and composer Tarek Abdelqader.

FILMMAKER BIO

Leila Awadallah is a dancer, choreographer, and community collaborator in Minneapolis and sometimes Beirut. Her research in dance centers movement that activates relationships to land / place / peoples, rooted in the context of her own skin as a body and soul that holds Palestinian, Arab-American, SWANA, Sicilian, and mixed Mediterranean waves and ways. With her sister-collaborator Noelle Awadallah, she holds and stewards the performances, workshops, and collaborations of Body Watani Dance project. Leila has received multiple fellowships: DanceUSA, McKnight, Jerome Hill, and Daring Dances. Her artistry is meaningfully impacted by her years working with Ananya Dance Theatre and Mizna (Mni Sota), The Theater of Women of the Camp and Beirut Physical Lab (Lebanon), and El-Funoun (Palestine).

Noelle Awadallah is a Palestinian-American choreographer, improviser, and farmer residing in Mni Sota Makoce (Minneapolis). She is the co-artistic director of Body Watani Dance project alongside sister, Leila Awadallah. Awadallah’s daily pursuit toward a land-based life emerges from sumud—a Palestinian ideology guiding steadfast perseverance and rooted relationality to homeland. Her artistic approach in upholding these ideologies extend from her commitment to multidirectional attention, embodied storytelling, grief and rage, sensuous imagination, and tending to relationship with land and more than human beings. She is currently a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow (2025–2028). Her artistic lifeforce is greatly influenced by her time as a company member with Ananya Dance Theatre (2019–2026) and practicing, playing, and learning with El-Funoun Dance Troupe. She farms at Cimarron Community Farm and lovingly co-holds the Grief and Rage Circle for Palestine. She received a BFA from Columbia College Chicago.

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.