September 10th, 20180PLEASANTVILLE, NY — The Jacob Burns Film Center is premiering its Contemporary Arab Cinema series, in partnership with the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Sept. 20-27.
This year’s selections reflect the diversity of the multifaceted situations and feelings Arab directors have within their cultural and political environments,...
June 8th, 20180
By Hanan Daqqa
Fairfax County Times
"You never know where something takes you as a writer… you think you want to write about one thing and it leads you to another path."
These are the words of Mona Mansour, a Lebanese American playwright who set out to write a play about her father's choice not to go back to...
April 6th, 20180ANN ARBOR – Filmmaker and media artist Razan AlSalah has enjoyed presenting content in a performative way since her primary schooling while growing up in Beirut, Lebanon.
On March 25, AlSalah won the Barbara Aronofsky Award for an Emerging Experimental Video Artist at the 56th Ann Arbor Film Festival.
Her short film, “Your...
March 30th, 20180DETROIT – On Thursday, April 5, local filmmaker Mohamed “Hamoody” Jaafar’s “Detroit Diamond” will make its world premiere at the Cleveland International Film Festival, an Academy Award qualifying festival.
“Detroit Diamond” follows a young single mother attempting to regain custody of her child from the state, despite...
March 23rd, 20180DETROIT — The Detroit Film Theatre held five screenings of Maysaloun Hamoud's first feature film, "In Between (Bar Bahar)", over the weekend of March 16. The film follows three Palestinian women as they share an apartment in Tel Aviv.
Elliot Wilhelm, the curator of the Detroit Film Theatre since 1974, said he thought the audiences...
November 23rd, 20170NAZARETH—“You see them, you love them; they are human like you,” Shady Srour, writer and director of the film “Holy Air”, said about the movie’s two main characters, Adam and Lamia. “They are modern, they want to live.”
Srour is a self-described minority inside a minority. He grew up an Arab living in Nazareth.
He...
September 3rd, 20171BERKELEY, CA — The Islamic Scholarship Fund (ISF) was founded in 2009 in response to the low number of Muslims in media and policy fields. ISF provides funding and mentorship to its awardees.
Before ISF was launched, Dr. Hamid Rezapour, the founder and president, was frustrated by the negative depictions of Islam and Muslims in the...
August 4th, 20170TRIPOLI, Lebanon — With paint peeling from the ceiling and crumbling plasterwork, renovating an abandoned picture house in the northern Lebanese town of Tripoli is more than a dream for Qassem Istanbouli.
The 31-year-old has reopened three such cinemas— two in his home city of Tyre in southern Lebanon and another in Nabatiyeh—...
