SERIES

MIZNA FILM SERIES

Fourth Wednesdays at the Trylon

The Mizna Film Series is a monthly selection of programs, marking Mizna’s first venture into year-round curated film programming. While the annual Film Festival organized by the St. Paul-based organization focuses primarily on the works of contemporary artists, the Mizna Film Series provides a space to expand Mizna’s regular film programming to include screenings, critical essays, filmmaker interviews, and discussions exploring revolutionary forms of cinema from the Southwest Asia and North Africa region and beyond.

The Series continues its monthly program with a special Beirut-focused summer series. Encountering the real effects of destruction, the films in this series complicate the relationship between fact and fiction, using poetry and other forms of intermediality to witness what emerges from ruins. Beirut, a city that has often been the site of sectarian, colonialist and imperialist violence, is a context which produces films that critically engage with images related to moments during, between, and after war and upheaval. At the center of this series is a retrospective of several early films by Jocelyne Saab, who uses documentary form to demonstrate the effects of violence in Lebanon and to challenge dominant western media perceptions and practices of filming and exhibiting war in Beirut. This series coincides with and honors the one year anniversary of the devastating Beirut Port explosion through the celebration of Lebanese filmmaking.