Featuring Jocelyne Saab’s works and celebrating Lebanese filmmaking
July 28–August 29, 2021
The Mizna Film 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 digitized 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.
The Mizna Film Series is a monthly selection which expands Mizna’s regular film programming to include screenings, critical essays, filmmaker interviews, and discussions exploring revolutionary forms of cinema from the SWANA region and beyond. This series is presented in person for Twin Cities audience in collaboration with Trylon Cinema. Films are also available through Mizna’s virtual cinema platform for a comfortable viewing experience from home in the fourth week of each month (Thursday to Sunday).
To attend online screenings, viewers can purchase individual tickets or a three-pack pass that can be used for any virtual film programs throughout the year.
July: Jocelyne Saab’s Beirut Trilogy
July will feature Jocelyne Saab’s Beirut Trilogy, a series of landmark works in Lebanese cinema and masterpieces of the essay film form. Trained as a radio and television journalist, Saab turned her attention to documentary films at the start of the Lebanese Civil War. Saab’s commitment to and intimate interactions with the displaced, the exiled, and the dispossessed, mark her films and her quest to capture Beirut as uniquely her own. July programming will feature Rayyane Tabet in conversation with Dalia Mostafa on July 30, 2021 at 12pm CT and an essay on the Beirut Trilogy by Linda Mokdad.
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August: Post/Protracted Civil War
Cultural works made in postwar Lebanon are often labyrinthine in form and content, as artists and their subjects attempt to understand, navigate, and resist the sectarian power structures that led to the war, and reckon with its boundless destruction. As the Lebanese people continue to live under protracted war infrastructures, the questions raised in the August films by Mai Masri and Jean Chamoun, Jalal Toufic and Graziella Rizkallah Toufic, and Ghassan Salhab remain as relevant as ever. August programming will feature a conversation with filmaker Mai Masri.
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