CAVE Film Festival Screening by the M and Mizna

Saturday, January 6, 2 p.m.
Bryant Lake Bowl | 810 W. Lake Street, Minneapolis
Tickets: $10

An afternoon of experimental films by Arab American filmmakers

This wintertime screening, curated by Andrea Shaker and Michelle Baroody and co-presented by Mizna and the Minnesota Museum of American Art, brings an exciting selection of experimental cinema by Arab American filmmakers to Cellular Cinema’s CAVE (Cinematic Audio Visual Experimentation) Film Festival: Usama Alshaibi, Basma Alsharif, Hisham Bizri, Ariana Hamidi, and Andrea Shaker. 

The term diaspora describes a spreading, a scattering—a dispersion of people who were once rooted in a different place and a different culture. Diaspora also registers movements, large or small, between languages and ideas and shifts across geographical and ideological lines. Cinema made by Arab and Arab American artists and thinkers is nearly always on the move, positioned to contend with narratives that limit the possibilities of its expression and interpretation, and expected to resist, revise, or renew worn out stories of colonialism, oppression, and violence. These short films offer an alternative, setting narrative aside to take up the conceptual and lived facets of diaspora and to explore the possibilities of the image itself, considering how it travels, what it picks up along the way, and what traces it leaves behind.

This event, copresented by Mizna, the Minnesota Museum of American Art (the M), and Cellular Cinema is part of The M Off-Site series of programs happening throughout the Twin Cities, while the M is closed for construction of its new facility opening in 2018.

This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.