Events

Event details

WHEN: Sept 24–28, 2025
WHERE: The Main Cinema + Walker Art Center

Mizna’s 19th Twin Cities Arab Film Festival holds its closing day with a pair of special screenings and a closing reception co-presented with and at the Walker Art Center.

In her lecture performance, Reassemblage in the Relational Film, filmmaker and Guggenheim Fellow Nadia Shihab explores how her filmmaking practice responds to rupture and loss through the reworking of fragments, while centering intergenerational collaboration, sound and polyvocality, the feminist archive, and resistance. The lecture will include screening of three recent short films by Shihab.

A conversation with artist Nadia Shihab follows the program.

TICKETS

Nadia Shihab is a filmmaker, artist, and educator whose work emerges through processes that are relational and intergenerational. Working primarily across film and sound, her projects are shaped by an interest in feeling and form, feminist subjectivity, counternarrative and experimentation. Her recent films include Sister Mother Lover Child, Echolocation, Amal’s Garden, and the feature-length film Jaddoland, which was awarded five festival jury awards including the Independent Spirit “Truer than Fiction” Award and was broadcast for three seasons on US public television. She is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in the Creative Arts, a Fulbright Scholar, and was a MacDowell Colony Fellow. Her work has screened in festivals and galleries internationally, including at Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, Cairo International Film Festival, Walker Art Center, Berkeley Art Museum, Sursock Museum (Beirut), Black Star Film Festival, Images Festival, DOXA Documentary Film Festival, Alchemy Film & Video Arts Festival, Camden International Film Festival, and Kasseler Dokfest. Her work has received support from the Sundance Documentary Fund, Firelight Media, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, the Center for Asian American Media, Tribeca Film Institute, and the Bay Area Video Coalition.

Shihab’s creative practice is preceded by more than a decade of work as a community practitioner, with graduate training in urban planning that grounds her creative approach within critical understandings of power, inequity, and the production of space. She was raised in west Texas by immigrant parents from Iraq and Yemen and is an assistant professor in film in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Her work is distributed by CFMDC and Grasshopper Film.