'A more Honest Story': Film Fest aims a Wide Lens on Arab Art, Life
SOURCE: SC TIMES
BY: ALYSSA ZACZEK
COLLEGEVILLE — In July 2014, Israeli forces shelled a Gaza school filled with women and sleeping children.
The school was being used to house more than 3,000 people, mostly Palestinian families, during a conflict known as “Operation Protective Edge.”
The shelling killed at least 15, and United Nations officials described the act as a serious violation of international law.
“Today the world stands disgraced,” said Pierre Krähenbühl, commissioner-general of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
His words resonated with many, including Andrea Shaker.
Her film “disgraced,” completed in 2014, was inspired by, and hearkens back to, Krähenbühl’s sobering assessment of international relations.
“It’s a piece that looks at how we view the world through the safety of distance,” said Shaker, 53. “The film is very meditative, and it’s the sounds of my home in the U.S. — sounds of me making coffee, reading the newspaper — with sort of background sounds of what might be happening (in Gaza.)”
The 12-minute experimental film “really asks people to sit … and hopefully bring on a more contemplative mood,” according to Shaker.
It’s just the kind of film Michelle Baroody was looking for when curating Mizna’s Arab Film Fest Tour.
“In some ways, the thing that connects all these films is that they are all incredibly relatable narratives, even the films that are documentaries,” Baroody said. “Especially in St. Cloud, where we haven’t screened films before and where there is tension between race and religion, it was important to have films about (Arab) people living their lives — lives which look very similar to what we’re living here.”
Mizna is a Twin Cities non-profit organization that promotes contemporary expression of Arab-American culture through ventures including literary journals, live performance, art projects and community events. Its Arab Film Festival began in 2003; Baroody, 37, has been curator since 2013.
Now, the organization is taking selections from past festivals on the road to six colleges and universities in the 2018 Arab Film Fest Tour, which is headed to the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University on April 14-15.
The St. Cloud leg of the tour will screen four full-length films and more than six short films from filmmakers hailing from as far away as Palestine, Tunisia and Egypt, and as close to home as Minneapolis. All of the filmmakers featured in the tour are Arab or Arab-American.
“‘Arab’ is a term that is very loaded,” Baroody said. “So, when we think about an Arab film festival, we want to paint that with a very broad brush. We want to make sure that we are representing many different ways of being Arab in the world.”
Baroody said the stereotypes of Arabs and Arab-Americans that run rampant in mainstream media have compelled Mizna to seek out artists committing more nuanced representations of Arab life to film.
“We try very hard to make sure we’re telling a different story. A more honest story, a story that actually reflects life as experienced by Arabs and those in the Arab diaspora. Stories about us, and our friends and our families,” she said.
Shaker is one such storyteller. In addition to being a professor of art at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University for the past 23 years, Shaker is an experimental filmmaker and an Arab-American. She’ll showcase several of her short films on April 14 as part of the tour.
Her films focus strongly on the intersection of imagery, sound and empathy, stemming largely from her own interest in and ties to the Middle East. One 2016 film, “on silence,” features the image of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee whose photo defined a moment in history after his body washed up on a Turkish beach following a fatal attempt at securing passage to Greece.
“In our visually-focused world, we see things, consume things, and then they’re off our screens. In this film, one of the things that I try to do through image and sound is call attention to that, but also, in some ways, create a memorial for this young boy,” Shaker said. “Through words, through imagery and through music, I’m asking folks to look at certain imagery for longer, to examine how we deal with images, and reflect on our role in places like Syria.”
Other works of Shaker’s have an even more personal origin.
“My four grandparents came from Lebanon,” Shaker explained. “I was on sabbatical in the spring of 2017. … I did a lot of filming in different homes in Lebanon, including my ancestral home.”
The home, when Shaker visited, was partially occupied and partially abandoned. It’s a result, she said, of the community and country rebuilding following their civil war. The home, like the country, was fragmented.
“This is a film that is made up of a sense of fragments,” she said of the resulting short, “on bayt,” ‘bayt’ being the Arabic word for ‘home.’ “‘Bayt’ means much more than a physical structure; it has to do with family, with a sense of belonging, with a sense of being, with all these things that go beyond … So, these fragments start to create a larger sense of whole in terms of memory and experience and the transference of experience between generations. That transference is often one of fragments.”
Shaker’s work raises questions of empathy and understanding: How much can we feel for people of starkly different backgrounds and experiences, living through unthinkable tragedy on the other side of the world? How can we relate to one another regardless of our differences?
She hopes that the Arab Film Festival will help others contemplate these questions.
“I think that’s one of the things that’s so great about the Arab Film Festival; it deals with all these questions in a really timely way,” she said. “It helps promote this understanding that people may have a similar background (to audience members.)”
Shaker believes that the “timing is great” for an Arab-centric film tour to arrive in the St. Cloud area.
“I think we face, in this area, a certain amount of tension that has been brought out around issues of immigration, issues of people coming to live in our communities,” she said. “I think it’s so vital for us to use art, to use film, as a way of trying to open up conversations and hopefully develop a sense of empathy and understanding in ways that might ease some of those tensions.”
The film fest tour is a new venture for Mizna, having never screened films outside of the Twin Cities. For Baroody, bringing the tour to St. Cloud was a natural fit, particularly considering the conversations that may be sparked by the screenings.
“Given that St. Cloud has been having all this tension around things that are obviously related to what we’re doing, it seems like a perfect beginning test-round for this project,” she said.
Through six screenings over two days, Baroody hopes audiences will see Arab art and people through a different lens — literally.
“Unfortunately, we live in a post 9/11 world where Arabness is seen in sort of sinister terms. As much as we want (the festival) to be about art and culture, it’s also sort of politicized,” she said. “So we have to think about those questions, and how we’re representing them through images, and how people will interact with that.”
