The Other Americans

Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans, out next week, begins as a murder mystery and grows into a larger story about fear, anger and resentment, about the meaning of love and the finding of home, exploring the grey zones of human behaviour and the schisms in society that allow us to mark people as other. The …

The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows

  "The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows,"  which took place over the past two days at John Cabot University in Rome, was advertised as  an examination of "the political economy of the Arab Image" which "reflects upon the materiality, ethics, and aesthetics of filming, distributing and archiving post-2011."  The workshop more than lived …

Arab Films Entered for Oscars

There are films from 92 countries entered for the Foreign Film category of the Oscars. Among these are eight films from Arabic-speaking countries. Several of the films deal in various ways with the impact of the conflict in Syria. There is the documentary from Syria, “Little Gandhi,” which follows the life and death of Syrian …

Luxor African Film Festival

The 5th edition of Luxor African Film Festival (LAFF) is scheduled to run between 17-23 March.  The festival was established to remedy the lack of attention paid to African films in Egypt, with Luxor chosen to "de-centralize cultural or artistic events always organized in Cairo and Alexandria" This year LAFF is honoring Omar Sharif, who …

From Mathaf to Madrid

The exhibition Looking at the World Around You: Contemporary Works from Qatar Museums is being held from 9 February to 19 June 2016 at the Santander Art Gallery in Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, the "first major loan exhibition in Europe of works from Mathaf, the Arab Museum of Contemporary Art in Doha."   This selection, more …

MENAR Film Festival

The Middle East & North Africa Region (MENAR) Film Festival in Sofia, Bulgaria, kicks off on January 14 and runs through the end of the month. The focus this year is on female directors - the films to be shown include Egyptian Nadine Khan's Chaos, Disorder (2012),  Tunisian Kaouther Ben Hania's The Blade of Tunis …

Sara Ouhaddou: Reinventing Old Patterns

French Moroccan artist Sara Ouhaddou will be taking part in a residency program in Brooklyn, New York at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP). Ouhaddou's art is based on the reinvention and transformation of traditional patterns and designs in collaboration with Moroccan craftswomen. In this interview, she describes her work as a "deconstruction": "I …

She Who Tells A Story

The exhibit “She Who Tells A Story” is a photography exhibit, a smaller scale Light from the Middle East which is dedicated to the work of women artists, featuring work by twelve women photographers from Iran and the Arab world. The photographers are: Iraqi Jananne Al-Ani, Yemeni Boushra Almutawakel, Iranians Gohar Dashti, Shadi Ghadirian, Newsha Tavakolian and Shirin Neshat, Egyptians Nermine …

Sonia Mbarek’s Maghrebi Network

Renowned Tunisian vocalist Sonia M'Barek, who earlier this month performed at French Institute Alliance Française in Manhattan, has spoken of her Wajd project and plans for collaboration with other Maghreb artists. Sonia expressed her desire to participate in work that joins Arab artists mainly from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. She also suggested the idea of creating a great network …

When Arab Women Artists “Revisit The Harem”

Where does tongue-in-cheek parody end and self-exoticization begin? At what point does the Arab woman artist, stepping into the so-often imagined space of "The Harem" risk pandering to an audience that seems to have a never-ending appetite for orientalist remediations? Lebanese photographer Rania Matar's wonderful and insightful A Girl in Her Room series (capturing teenage girls in …

The Second AFAC Film Week

In its second Film Week, The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) is bringing works by filmmakers from seven Arab countries (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia) to Cairo. The week-long programme will run between 15 and 22 April at Zawya cinema. The films to be shown include: Return to Homs by Talal Derky …

Four Arab Films at TIFF

Saibal Chatterjee at The Gulf Today writes about the four Arab films screened at the 39th Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF),  Palestinian Suha Arraf’s Villa Touma on four Christian women in Ramallah, Jordanian Naji Abu Nowar’s "Bedouin Western" Theeb (Wolf), Lebanese Ghassan Salhab’s drama of amnesia and hostage-taking, The Valley, and Iraqi-Moroccan Tala Hadid’s "psychologically …

Rock the Casbah

The Daily Star interviews Rock the Casbah stars Laila Marrakchi and Nadine Labaki. Marrakchi directed the film, while Labaki is a filmmaker in her own right, with her 2007 “Sikkar al-Banat” (Caramel), a dramedy centering on an east Beirut beauty salon, as well as“Wa Halla l’Wayn?” (Where Do We Go Now?) a fable-like film about …

Unerasable Memories

A video exhibition which opens on August 30th in São Paulo will feature work by three Lebanese artists, Akram Zaatari, Walid Raad, and Rabih Mroué, as well as Morocco’s Bouchra Khalili. The full title of the exhibition is “Unerasable Memories – A Historical Take on the Videobrasil Collection,” referring to the Videobrasil project, which claims …

2014 Arab Film Festival in Korea

The 2014 Arab Film Festival is being held from the 20th to the 26th in Cinematheque Busan as part of the Arab Cultural Festival, running from May to July, including an art exhibition, a photography exhibition and a public lecture series. This is the second consecutive year for the festival, which is hosted by Korea-Arab …

Arab Cinema Round-Up

"A truly original programme of Arab cinema for British cinema-goers, this week-long series of classic and contemporary popular cinema takes audiences on a journey of gripping dramas, subversive comedies and exaggerated melodramas, taking in an array of re-mastered cinematic masterpieces and new releases." The Arab British Centre has been doing some amazing work on popular …