20th Arab Film Festival

Saturday, September 26 at 12:30 PM

We imagine time as a continuum—from past, through our present, to the future. Yet, ruptures continually disturb our real experiences of time. This selection of short films explores themes of rupture and separation through multiple lenses, manifesting in the various, connected forms of familial separation, cultural dislocation, and the physical rupture of forced displacement. Each film allows us to reflect on how these ruptures come to be, the anxieties they impose, and how we move forward, or how we remain, in the split paths they create.

ABOUT THE FILMS

VILLA 187

Dir. Eiman Mirghani • Qatar, Sudan • 2025 • Arabic, English • 10 min
One day, Sudanese filmmaker Eiman Mirghani’s phone buzzed with a message: her father had lost his job, and the family had to pack up their life in the Doha house they’d called home for decades. The shock cracked open a flood of memories inside Villa 187, blurring nostalgia with the anxiety of an uncertain future. Through this rediscovery, questions emerge: What does belonging look like when you’re already displaced? How do you say goodbye to walls that raised you? And can a house hold the story of a family long after they’ve gone?

FILMMAKER BIO

Eiman Mirghani is a Sudanese filmmaker based in Qatar. Eiman is the founder and senior producer of a film production house called FilmMENA, which aims to assist and elevate filmmakers from the Middle East and North African region. In 2021, Eiman was one of the producers of the short Sudanese film Al-Sit, which has received accolades in numerous international film festivals and has become qualified for the Academy Awards. Eiman’s second short film, The Bleaching Syndrome, was directed under the mentorship of world-renowned filmmaker Rithy Panh and has traveled to several international film festivals. Eiman created Villa 187 as part of the Doha Film Institute’s Documentary Lab Fellowship.

A DRONE STORY

Dir. Laura Menassa • Lebanon • 2025 • Arabic, English • 10 min
Beirut, November 2024. The weight of silence gives way to a constant buzzing within the city’s noise, growing until it becomes unbearable. Through fragments of daily life, the film unfolds as a quiet dialogue with an unseen force: one that watches and haunts everyday, revealing how war seeps into routine, thought, and body.

FILMMAKER BIO

Laura Menassa, Beirut-based photographer and filmmaker, explores body, memory, and routine, weaving intimate stories with political realities to unveil hidden lives and forge spaces of quiet resistance.

BUFFER ZONE

Dir. Farrah Berrou • Lebanon • 2025 • Arabic, English • 18 min
In Buffer Zone, which is part documentary and part memoir, Farrah Berrou takes us to her ancestral border village of Kfarkila in southern Lebanon for the first time since October 8, 2023, the same day that Lebanon became a support-front to Gaza and Palestine in a post-October 7th world.

FILMMAKER BIO

Farrah Berrou is a Lebanese-American writer and artist based in Beirut, Lebanon. Her work explores themes of identity as it is presented in the everyday minutiae, personal archives, and memory. Currently, she writes Aanab News, a newsletter on Lebanese culture. When she’s not wandering around a neighborhood on foot or clacking away on her MacBook at a cafe, Farrah is at home with her talkative rescue cat, Penny.

MORNING CIRCLE

Dir. Basma al-Sharif • Canada, UAE, Germany • 2025 • Arabic, Armenian, German • 21 min
Basma al-Sharif’s sensorial film traces the intimate and political contours of exile and colonial morality. Following a father and son through the quiet rhythms of early morning, the film gradually reveals the weight of separation and displacement, as well as the subtle violences of assimilation. Built as a choreography of three circles unfolding in the home, playground, and kindergarten, the film explores how domestic rituals, tender exchanges, and institutional routines carry the burden of history.

FILMMAKER BIO

Using precise visual language, dark humour, and attention to landscape and sound, Palestinian artist/filmmaker Basma al-Sharif works across film, installation, writing and photography. Creating lyrical, poetic works her practice addresses ongoing violence and its representation, she explores the legacy of colonialism within inescapable power systems.

WHISPERS OF A BURNING SCENT

Dir. Mo Harawe • Somalia, Austria, Germany • 2026 • Somali • 28 min
On the day of a decisive court hearing and an important wedding performance, a quiet wedding musician finds his private life exposed to public scrutiny. Accused of exploiting his marriage, he moves between courtroom, city streets, and stage, carrying the weight of judgment, loyalty, and unspoken guilt. Forced to make a restrained but irreversible decision, the film observes a man whose inner truth remains elusive, caught between devotion, dignity, and loss.

FILMMAKER BIO

Mo Harawe is a Somali-Austrian filmmaker and screenwriter. His award-winning short films include Life on the Horn (2020) and Will My Parents Come to See Me (2022). In 2024, his debut feature The Village Next to Paradise premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival.

VISITOR

Dir. Lily Ekimian Ragheb, Ahmed T. Ragheb • USA • 2025 • English • 9 min
The titular visitor of our film wanders through the lonely streets of the post-industrial Rust Belt searching for family, separated from them by time, space, and circumstances—both human and supernatural. As she travels, she (and we) observe the effects of time and decay on our region, reminded of the waves of immigrant populations that once built it.

FILMMAKER BIOS

Ahmed T. Ragheb & Lily Ekimian Ragheb are a married experimental filmmaking duo based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Lily (American, Russian, and Armenian) grew up between Washington, DC, and Cairo, Egypt. Ahmed (Egyptian, Dutch, and American) was born and raised in Cairo. Their work explores identity, feminism, cultural dislocation and domestic relationships, and they are noted for their use of voiceover and mixed media. Their films have screened at world-renowned festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam (Tiger Short Competition), Cairo International Film Festival, Uppsala Short Film Festival (Nominated, Ingmar Bergman Award), L’Alternativa Barcelona, AIFVF, the Arab American National Museum, and the Mattress Factory Contemporary Art Museum. Artist residencies and awards they’ve received include the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center, and the Gift to America 2.0 Artist Commission by SPMMMV. Together they founded the independent production company Studio Ragheb.

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.