19th Arab Film Festival

SCREENS AT THE WALKER ART CENTER

Sunday, September 28 at 3:30 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.

In her lecture performance, Reassemblage in the Relational Film, filmmaker and Guggenheim Fellow Nadia Shihab explores how her filmmaking practice responds to rupture and loss through the reworking of fragments, while centering intergenerational collaboration, sound and polyvocality, the feminist archive, and resistance. The lecture will include screening of three recent short films by Shihab.

A conversation with artist Nadia Shihab follows the program.

ABOUT THE FILMS

OUR VOICES IN REVERSE

Dir. Nadia Shihab • USA, Canada • 2013/2022 • Iraqi Turkish (Turkman) and English w/ English subtitles • 3 min
Nadia Shihab’s first analog film was shot in Super 8 from the roof of her mother’s home in west Texas in summer 2013. The film is an experiment in reversing roles and the precursor to a feature film that debuted several years later.

SISTER MOTHER LOVER CHILD

Dir. Nadia Shihab • USA, Canada • 2023 • Iraqi Turkish (Turkman) and English w/ English subtitles • 18 min
It is spring yet all is colored by a season of grief. A child dances, the grapevine ripens. We press our ears to the glass and hear singing from afar. Suspended, together, we are an unlikely constellation. The filmmaker holds the frame until she finds the form.

ECHOLOCATION

Dir. Nadia Shihab • USA, Canada • 2021 • Iraqi Turkish (Turkman) and English w/ English subtitles • 9 min
The rain in Oakland, Shihab’s grandmother’s home in Baghdad, her aunts’ voices in What’sApp, her daughter learning to count to 10, her brother playing the darbuka, the cicadas in Texas, the walls of her studio, the search for new forms.

FILMMAKER BIO

Nadia Shihab is a filmmaker, artist, and educator whose work emerges through processes that are relational and intergenerational. Working primarily across film and sound, her projects are shaped by an interest in feeling and form, feminist subjectivity, counternarrative and experimentation. Her recent films include Sister Mother Lover Child, Echolocation, Amal’s Garden, and the feature-length film Jaddoland, which was awarded five festival jury awards including the Independent Spirit “Truer than Fiction” Award and was broadcast for three seasons on US public television. She is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in the Creative Arts, a Fulbright Scholar, and was a MacDowell Colony Fellow. Her work has screened in festivals and galleries internationally, including at Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, Cairo International Film Festival, Walker Art Center, Berkeley Art Museum, Sursock Museum (Beirut), Black Star Film Festival, Images Festival, DOXA Documentary Film Festival, Alchemy Film & Video Arts Festival, Camden International Film Festival, and Kasseler Dokfest. Her work has received support from the Sundance Documentary Fund, Firelight Media, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, the Center for Asian American Media, Tribeca Film Institute, and the Bay Area Video Coalition.

Shihab’s creative practice is preceded by more than a decade of work as a community practitioner, with graduate training in urban planning that grounds her creative approach within critical understandings of power, inequity, and the production of space. She was raised in west Texas by immigrant parents from Iraq and Yemen and is an assistant professor in film in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Her work is distributed by CFMDC and Grasshopper Film.

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.