Mizna's Twin Cities Arab Film Festival

As Mizna marks our 25th organizational anniversary, the 18th Twin Cities Arab Film Festival returns September 25-29, 2024 at the Main Cinema in Minneapolis with a closing day of special films, programs, and a reception at the Walker Art Center. Anchored by stories from Palestine and Sudan, the 2024 festival brings programming that responds to the catastrophic state faced by much of the SWANA region.

Schedule of Events:

12:00pm: Filmmaking on Our Own Terms

Mizna's Twin Cities Arab Film Festival is a place to see contemporary films from the SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) region, films that are relevant to our communities in the Twin Cities and around the world. This year, we also aim to create a space for BIPOC and SWANA filmmakers by offering a workshop to discuss best practices, common questions, and works-in-progress. Living in diaspora can make it difficult to find filmmakers with similar questions and to receive feedback from folks within the community; many of us often rely on non-SWANA and non-BIPOC spaces for dialogue and critique. Mizna invites filmmaker and educator Fatima Wardy to create such spaces for SWANA and BIPOC filmmakers. During the 2024 Twin Cities Arab Film Festival, selected filmmakers will come together for a two-day symposium that addresses the various challenges that filmmakers face. Participants will present finished, incomplete, partial, or potential projects to one another to receive feedback and advice on how to take the project to the next level.  

Venue: FilmNorth, 550 Vandalia Street, Suite 120, Saint Paul, MN

5:00pm: Life Is Beautiful

In 2014, while a young Palestinian director Mohamed Jabaly was visiting a film festival in Tromsø, Norway, Israel launched a war on Gaza and the borders to his home were closed. It will be seven years before he can return home and see his family again. While waiting for the situation to change, Jabaly and friends begin documenting the process of applying for asylum. Facing many challenges, Mohamed stays connected with family in Gaza. They provide solace, but when Gaza is attacked again, Mohamed is faced with an impossible choice: if he goes back to Gaza, he may never be able to leave again and continue his work as a filmmaker. Told by a director who uses his creativity to connect with the world and forge a way forward,

7:00pm: The Burdened

Aden, Yemen, 2019: Civil war has been raging for five long years. Isra'a and Ahmed are in a constant battle to provide for their five children-putting food on the table, dealing with daily power outages, and finding gasoline for their van makes life a minute-by-minute struggle. When they discover that Isra'a is pregnant, they scrape together their meager funds for an abortion. But money proves to be the least of their worries, and the state's bureaucratic labyrinth and the country's strict social mores drive the family to the brink.

9:15pm: Anxious in Beirut

In the ever-present desire to capture, record, and understand Beirut-and by extension himself- Zakaria Jaber has been trying to provide a coherent story for his city through film. Anxious in Beirut is a personal diary that documents the events of the last few years in Lebanon, capturing revolution, collapse conditions, explosions, and demonstrations. Living with constant anxiety, Zakaria, the film's young director, narrates his own life and the lives of those close to him as they navigate a worsening economic and political situation in Lebanon. Frustrated, he and his friends also consider leaving their country, a decision that each struggles to make.

The Diary of a Sky

The Diary of a Sky unfolds an atmospheric symphony of violence over Beirut, revealing the haunting fusion of incessant Israeli military flights and the hum of generators during blackouts. This 45-minute video essay plunges viewers into a chilling chronicle of daily life transformed by the weaponization of the air, where the terror of repeated incursions becomes a disconcertingly banal backdrop.

Venue: The Main Cinema, 115 SE Main St, Minneapolis, MN

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