SERIES
Fourth Wednesdays at the Trylon
The Mizna Film Series is a monthly selection of Southwest Asian/North African (SWANA) film programming curated by Mizna, a St. Paul–based, Arab American arts nonprofit that publishes a biannual Arab American literary journal and presents the annual Twin Cities Arab Film Festival each fall. The Mizna Film Series expands Mizna’s regular programming to include repertory screenings, critical essays, filmmaker interviews, and discussions, exploring documentary, narrative, and non-narrative filmmaking practices and aesthetics from the SWANA region and beyond.
The Mizna Film Series screens classic and contemporary works by SWANA artists at the Trylon on the fourth Wednesday of every month at 7 p.m. Ticket prices vary. If you miss a screening, most films are available on Mizna’s virtual cinema following the in-person screening.
(1979, DCP, 109m, Algeria/Lebanon) dir Farouk Beloufa w/Yasmine Khlat. Farouk Beloufa’s only feature film follows a group of leftist friends in Beirut in the early 1970s. Larbi, a young Algerian journalist reporting in Lebanon, is swept up in the whirlwind of events following the January 1975 battle of Kfarchouba. As Beirut sinks into chaos, Larbi […]
The films produced by Djouhra Abouda and Alain Bonnamy pushed the purely formal boundaries of experimental cinema in a combination of avant-garde aesthetics and political activism. Working in the cinema department of the Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes in Paris, Abouda and Bonnamy made two experimental short films Algérie Couleurs (1972) and Ciné-Cité (1974) and […]
ISMYRNA (2016, DCP, 50m, Lebanon, French w/ English subtitles) dir Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. Joana Hadjithomas met the artist and poet Etel Adnan at the end of the 1990s. They quickly grew close, bound by links to a city they had never been to: Smyrna formerly, known today as Izmir. Hadjithomas’s paternal Greek family were forced […]