Arab American National Museum kicks off film festival in Michigan

In-person and virtual festival showcases films from Arab world and diaspora

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  A scene from The Gravedigger's Wife, directed by Khadar Ayderus Ahmed and starring Omar Abdi and Yasmin Warsame. All photos: Arab American National Museum

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  Filmmakers Hanadi Elyan, Bahia Amawi and Daniel Nerenberg will attend screenings at the museum.

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  The film Costa Brava, Lebanon stars Nadine, Labaki, Saleh Bakri and Nadia Charbel and was directed by Mounia Akl.

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  Costa Brava, Lebanon follows a couple leaving Beirut, hoping to find a home in the mountains.

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  A scene from Salma's Home, directed by Hanadi Elyan.

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  Directed by Morad Mostafa, Khadiga takes place in Cairo, Egypt.

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  Bloody Beans is a take on the Algerian War by Narimane Mari.

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  A poster for the 1991 film Kit Kat, part of the exhibition Safar: A Journey Through Popular Arab Cinema.

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  A poster for the 1971 film Zouzou from the exhibit Safar: A Journey Through Popular Arab Cinema.

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  Schoolchildren are led on a tour of the museum.

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  The museum also hosts Arab-American writers such as Tahereh Mafi, author of Shatter Me.

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  The cover of Mafi's Shatter Me.

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  Amr Alnagmah's Digital Spirituality mixed-media installation, part of the museum's Epicentre X: Saudi Contemporary Art exhibit, in collaboration with the King Abdulaziz Centre for World Culture.

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  Ahmed Angawi's Wijha 2:148 - And everyone has a direction to which they should turn, 2013, Digital Lenticular Print mounted on Aluminium.

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  A display at the museum highlighting Arab Americans in Washington.

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  Sophia Al Maria, author of The Girl Who Fell to Earth: A Memoir and an award-winning filmmaker, is one of the artists the museum has honoured in the past.

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  Poster for the 2022 Arab Film Festival at Dearborn, Michigan's Arab American National Museum.

The Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, will kick off the Arab Film Festival on Friday.

Home to one of the largest Arab-American communities in the country, some consider Dearborn to be the “Arab capital” of the US and the museum has been devoted to documenting, preserving and presenting the history, culture and contributions of the community since 2005.

The annual festival will run from August 12 to 21, with a line-up featuring everything from live-action comedy shorts to full-length features, animation and even documentaries tackling America's Israel bias.

Directors Hanadi Elyan, Bahia Amawi and associate Daniel Nerenberg will attend screenings at the museum.

“As a young Arab American myself, I never really saw my story, my family story reflected in the music I listened to or the films that I watched or the textbooks in my classroom,” said Dave Serio, curator of education at the museum.

“So our goal really is to kind of inspire Arab Americans to see their stories, their perspective, people that look like them, names that they might have, on the big screen.”

Beginning in 2005, it is one of the museum's longest-running programmes and offers a range of windows into Arab cinematic creativity and storytelling.

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  Director and writer Alessandra El Chanti shoots for When Beirut Was Beirut. All photos: Alessandra El Chanti

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  Lebanon's Beit Beirut is among the buildings given a voice in the short film.

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  Lebanon's Beit Beirut as imagined in the animated film When Beirut Was Beirut.

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  Beirut's famous Egg as imagined in the short film.

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  Ms El Chanti explores what Lebanon's inanimate objects might have to say in her short film.

One of the films in this year's set is When Beirut Was Beirut from writer-director Alessandra El Chanti. The short is a “poetic hybrid documentary” that focuses on an imagined conversation between three famous buildings in the Lebanese capital and what they witnessed during the country's civil war.

“I wonder what inanimate objects could say, because they also have stories, too,” Ms El Chanti, a Lebanese citizen who now lives in Doha, Qatar, told The National.

“I feel like we always go to Lebanon and we're just passers-by — we recognise that there are war-torn buildings, you can see the bullet holes.

“But there's so much character in them like that … if you see buildings, you really feel like, you know, they want to say something.”

The film, which began production in 2020, was produced entirely over Zoom by an all-Lebanese team of six artists.

Many of the films at this year's festival will be making their US or Michigan state debut, Mr Serio said.

Ms El Chanti hopes members of the Lebanese diaspora watching her film at the festival walk away feeling “there's a lot that you should learn about your country that you don't know about — it literally could be from the perspective of anything and everything”.

Yasmina Tawil, the director of film programming at the Arab Film and Media Institute — one of the festival's sponsors — told The National that while Arab film festivals such as this are considered “niche” in the entertainment industry, they can build towards more inclusion in the mainstream.

“[Arab film festivals] are not the taste makers of the industry … yet,” said Ms Tawil.

“We're not a Sundance, we're not a Cannes.

“But when a distributor goes to pick up a film, [the festivals] will add to the credence and the hype of the film. And I would at least hope that distributors would look at that as a sign of one of their big audiences … already knows about and really likes the film enough to programme it in their festival.”

Accessibility to the mainstream American market is one of the most difficult hurdles Arab films have faced, Ms Tawil said.

“They'll get picked up for distribution in the Middle East, in Europe and then maybe not make it over here [to the US]. Or if a torrented copy does, it might not have English subtitles and things like that.”

She added that her institute's mission is, in part, to serve as a “caretaker” for Arab films in America.

A scene from Salma's Home, directed by Hanadi Elyan. Photo: Arab American National Museum

“Even if they're not in theatres, just somewhere where people can go and can license a copy and show it at their school or show it in their festival, or show it in their theatre, or rent it to watch at home. That's so big.”

The museum has offered both virtual and in-person attendance options, opening its mission to viewers across state and national borders.

“The Arab-American community is ridiculously talented,” said Mr Serio. “And our film festival is just honoured to be able to showcase a fraction of the amazing work that the Arab-American community is working on.”