The 2021 Arab Film Festival

The 15th edition of Mizna’s Twin Cities Arab Film Festival (TCAFF) returns September 29–October 3, 2021.

This year’s fest will be held in a hybrid format, combining in-person and online film screenings and events. The in-person components of the festival will take place at Trylon Cinema, Minneapolis. The online components will be hosted through Mizna’s virtual cinema platform, with most screenings accessible to those across the US.

Mizna’s Arab Film Fest debuts independent narrative, documentary, and experimental features and short films from more than 15 Arabic-speaking countries and their diasporas. The festival puts SWANA (South West Asian and North African) filmmakers at all career stages in critical dialogue with one another and with Mizna audiences. Each year, Minnesota and US audiences gather to enjoy the varied ways that SWANA artists represent and montage their social realities.

Curated by Michelle Baroody, Mizna Film Programs Curator, and Ahmed AbdulMageed, Mizna Film Programs Coordinator, with input from Mizna’s Film Screening Committee, the festival opens with Souad directed by Ayten Amin which premiered earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival. The film follows a nineteen-year-old woman obsessed with her image on social media, where she has several secret virtual relationships with men. A series of small incidents lead to tragedy, and Soad’s younger sister embarks on a journey looking for answers about her sister’s life and dreams.

Additionally, the fest will bring audiences films such as Ameen Nayfeh’s 200 Meters, a compelling narrative which depicts the daily struggles of Palestinian life under occupation in the West Bank, and Ghassan Salhab’s An Open Rose, an experimental documentary and exploration of the archive honoring the legacy of Marxist thinker Rosa Luxemborg. A shorts segment titled Between Stagnation and Movement features films which explore themes of migration, memory, and human relations to nonhuman life.

In its partnership with the Trylon Cinema, Minneapolis’s premier repertory theater, TCAFF 2021’s lineup will include several recent restorations of classic cinema, such as Egyptian filmmaker Shadi Abdel Salam’s haunting Al-Mumia (1969) and Moroccan filmmaker Mostafa Derkaoui’s rediscovered hybrid documentary About Some Meaningless Events (1974). 

In addition to classic and contemporary short and feature-length films, the festival will present virtual panel discussions with filmmakers, scholars, and film industry professionals. On October 3, 2021, audiences can expect to attend a conversation on the eclectic cultural scene of 1970s Morocco with scholar Omar Berrada and filmmakers Ali Essafi and Ahmed Maanouni, whose films will be playing at the fest. On October 2, 2021, documentarian Sarah Francis and artist Mona Benyamin will discuss how themes of lunar colonization appear in each of their films, exploring questions about the outer limits of exile and displacement. This discussion will be moderated by Róisín Tapponi. On October 1, 2021 Filmmaker Darine Hotait will be in conversation with writer and psychologist Hala Alyan. Mizna will screen Hotait’s newest film, in which Alyan portrays the main character.

The full schedule and individual tickets are available here.

All-access passes for virtual and in-person events are 100 USD, available here.

Virtual passes are 60 USD, available here.