(2021, DCP, narrative, 92m, Arabic w/ English subtitles) dir. Darin J. Sallam w/Karam Taher, Ashraf Barhom, Ali Suliman. Palestine, Jordan. Farha is a fourteen-year-old girl who lives in a small village in Palestine in 1948. Girls her age are traditionally married off or spoken for, but Farha wants to continue her education, despite her village’s custom of restricting girls from attending school. Farha dreams of joining her best friend Farida, who spends weekends in the village but lives in the city where she attends school. Just when Farha’s father is finally convinced to allow Farha to go to school, a looming menace descends on the village. As violence escalates, Farha’s father conceals her in a small storage space to protect her, promising to return. Through a small hole in the wall and a few cracks in the wooden door, Farha witnesses events that change her life.

(2021, DCP, documentary, 98m, Portuguese, Arabic, Tamazight, and French w/English subtitles) dir. Karim Aïnouz. Algeria, Brazil. In January 2019, filmmaker Karim Aïnouz decides to take a boat across the Mediterranean and embark on his first journey to Algeria. Accompanied by his camera and the memory of his mother, Iracema, Aïnouz provides a detailed account of the journey to his father’s homeland; from crossing the sea to his arrival in the Atlas Mountains in Kabylia—a mountainous region in northern Algeria—the film follows a winding path through languages, memories, relatives, and histories, all the while interweaving the present, past, and future.

AND THEN THEY BURN THE SEA (2021, DCP, short, 12m, Arabic w/English subtitles) dir. Majid Al-Remaihi. Qatar. Through an elegiac contemplation on familial memory and loss, filmmaker Majid Al-Remaihi ruminates on the experience of witnessing his mother’s gradual and terminal memory loss over the course of many years. Weaving a personal family archive with reenacted dreams and rituals, the film underlines the promise of cinema as a medium for memories even at their most irretrievable.

MAY GOD BE WITH YOU (2021, DCP, documentary, 77m, French, Hebrew, and Arabic w/English subtitles) dir. Cléo Cohen. France, Algeria, Tunisia. Cléo wonders if she has to choose between being a Jewish and an Arab woman. She pays visits, again and again, to her four grandparents, Jews from Algeria and Tunisia, exiled in France in the 1960s. She is determined to confront them with the meaning of these two identities she inherited from them, seemingly so contradictory. With humor and self-mockery, she questions the contradictions and the unthoughts, staging the many different versions of her constantly rewritten family history. In this search of a history that is full of holes, the film aims to turn frustrated relationships into memories and transmissions. Post-screening in person Q&A with director Cléo Cohen.

BABA (2021, DCP, short, 18m, Arabic w/English subtitles) dir. Adam Ali + Sam Arbor w/Adam Ali, Colette Dala Tchantcho. United Kingdom. Rejected by his family for his queerness and oppressed by his country for the same, reckless Libyan teenager “Britannia” gets an interview at the British embassy, taking him one step closer to his childhood dream of stepping foot on Manchester’s Canal Street, the pulsing queer center of the world. But first he must return home to retrieve his passport and face his past.

WARSHA (2022, DCP, short, 15m, Arabic w/English subtitles) dir. Dania Bdeir w/Khansa. Lebanon. Mohammad is a crane operator working in Beirut. One morning he volunteers to take on one of the tallest and notoriously most dangerous cranes in Lebanon. Up above, he is able to live out his secret passion and find freedom.

SHALL I COMPARE YOU TO A SUMMER’S DAY? (BASHTAALAK SA’AT) (2022, DCP, narrative/essay film, 66m, Arabic w/English subtitles) dir. Mohammad Shawky Hassan w/Ahmed Awadalla, Nadim Bahsoun, Hassan Dib. Egypt, Lebanon, Germany. A glance leads to a smile, a smile to a rendezvous: every love story begins the same way. These narratives are stored in songs and poems and live on beyond their inevitable endings, as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 suggests. In Mohammad Shawky Hassan’s metafictional essay, a female narrator who wishes to tell the story of a love between two men encounters a polyamorous chorus of lovers, and this oft-told tale is multiplied. In Club Scheherazade, there is no protagonist and every song has various versions.

(2021, DCP, documentary, 128m, Arabic, Spanish, English, and French w/English subtitles) dir. Eliane Raheb. Spain, Lebanon, Germany. Miguel’s War is the story of a gay man who grew up oppressed and shamed during the Lebanese Civil War. Raised by a conservative Catholic father and an authoritarian Syrian mother, teenage Miguel was incapable of asserting himself. In 1983, desperate to prove he “exists” and can act like “a real man,” Miguel joined the fighting as part of an armed faction. But his experience was devastating. Traumatized, he immigrates to post-Franco Madrid, where he seeks to liberate himself through debauchery. A string of destructive relationships lead him to attempt suicide. Trying to pull himself together, Miguel becomes an interpreter in Barcelona. Now, thirty-seven years after leaving Lebanon, Miguel feels ready to face his trauma and the ghosts of his past, hoping to regain his emotional balance and maybe even find love. Filmed on location in Lebanon and Spain, this feature film intertwines cinematic forms, melding documentary, animation, theater, and archival footage, to tell a story about confrontation, self-awareness, and catharsis.

(2021, DCP, narrative, 113m, Arabic w/English subtitles) dir. Ameer Fakher Eldin w/Ashraf Barhom, Mohammad Bakri, Amal Kais. In a small village in the occupied Golan Heights, the life of a desperate unlicensed doctor, who is going through an existential crisis, takes another unlucky turn when he encounters a man wounded in the war in Syria. Overturning all community expectations in times of war and national crisis, he ventures forth to meet his newly found destiny.

WILL MY PARENTS COME TO SEE ME (2022, DCP, short, 28m, Somali w/English subtitles) dir. Mo Harawe. Somalia. A policewoman sits in her parked car. After a while, she gets out, puts on her service cap, and enters the prison. There, decisive hours have dawned for young Farah; he is examined by a doctor, instructed by the bailiff, and looked after by an imam. And he continues waiting for his parents to visit.

YOU RESEMBLE ME (2021, DCP, narrative, 90m, French and Arabic w/English subtitles) dir. Dina Amer w/Lorenza Grimaudo, Ilonna Grimaudo, Mouna Soualem, Sabrina Ouazani. US, France, Egypt. Produced by Spike Lee, Spike Jonze, and Riz Ahmed, among others, You Resemble Me blends documentary and narrative techniques to tell a harrowing story about loss, displacement, and violence. Cultural and intergenerational trauma erupt in this story about two sisters on the outskirts of Paris. After the siblings are torn apart, the eldest, Hasna, struggles to find her identity, leading her to make a choice that shocks the world. Director Dina Amer takes on one of the darkest issues of our time and deconstructs it in an intimate story about family, love, sisterhood, and belonging.

NIGHT (2021, DCP, short, 16m, Arabic w/English subtitles) dir. Ahmed Saleh w/Hiam Abbas, Rafia H. Oraidi, Salma Saleh. Germany, Qatar, Palestine, Jordan. The dust of war keeps the eyes sleepless. Night brings peace and sleep to most people in the broken town. But the eyes of a mother of a missing child stay open. Night must trick her into sleeping in order to save her soul.

LINGUI, THE SACRED BONDS (2021, DCP, narrative, 88m, French and Arabic w/English subtitles) dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun w/Achouackh Abakar, Rihane Khalil Alio. Chad, France. On the outskirts of Chad’s capital city, determined single mother Amina works tirelessly to provide for herself and her fifteen-year-old daughter, Maria. When Amina discovers Maria is pregnant and does not want a child, the two women begin to seek out an abortion, condemned by both religion and law.

(2021, DCP, documentary, 82m, Arabic and English w/English subtitles) dir. Sarah Beddington. Lebanon, Palestine, United Kingdom. While millions of birds migrate freely in the skies, Fadia, a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, yearns for the ancestral homeland she is denied. She challenges the director, Sarah, to find an ancient mulberry tree that stands witness to her family’s existence with only inherited memories, a blind man, and a two-headed dragon as her guides. Along the way, Sarah meets with ornithologists whose observations on the homing instincts of the birds that pass through the area inadvertently reveal the unresolved problems of the region. Spanning fifteen years, this story of a friendship that stays connected across a divided land and a fragmented people adopts a bird’s eye perspective to reflect on freedom of movement, exile, and the hope of return.

Mizna’s 16th Twin Cities Arab Film Festival opens with Memory Box and a post-screening discussion with Lebanese artist duo Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. On Christmas Eve, Maia and her daughter Alex receive an unexpected delivery of notebooks, tapes, and photos from Maia’s life in 1980s Beirut. Maia refuses to open the box, but Alex secretly dives into her mother’s archive. Alternating between fantasy and reality, Alex enters the world of her mother’s tumultuous, passionate adolescence during the Lebanese Civil War. 2021, France/Lebanon/Canada/Qatar, DCP, in Arabic and French with English subtitles, 102 minutes.