Centre-Stage:
The Rise of Arab Women in Film
Palestinian and Arab women filmmakers have been dominating the screens at film festivals across the globe. While Hollywood grapples with the lack of female representation on screen and behind the cameras – the Arab film world is being dominated by trailblazing female directors who are not only winning international accolades but also tackling social issues and starting conversations that need to be had.
Panellists
Kiva Reardon – Middle East & Africa film programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival
Rula Nasser – Jordanian-Canadian film producer, The Imaginarium Films
Razan AlSalah – Lebanese-Palestinian filmmaker, video artist and profession at Concordia University
Moderator TBC
This is not a ticketed event (free).
A donation at the door is greatly appreciated.
Kiva Reardon is a programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival and Miami Film Festival, and the founding editor of cléo, a journal of film and feminism. She curates the Redux section at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. Her writing has been published in Filmmaker, Cineaste, Hazlitt, The Globe and Mail, Maisonneuve, National Post, POV Magazine, The A.V. Club, and others. Previously, she’s worked at the Doha Film Institute in Qatar. She has programmed the film series "Radical Empathy: The Films of Agnès Varda" (2018) and “Beyond Badass: Female Action Heroes" (2015) for the TIFF Cinematheque, and you can see her on VICELAND’s VICE Guide to Film. She has spoken at the British Film Institute, the National Gallery of Canada and on numerous international panels, and co-hosted the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s TV show IFFR Live. She holds a Master’s degree in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto.
Razan AlSalahis a filmmaker and media artist and teaches Intermedia and Moving Images at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the 2018 Knight Foundation New Frontier Fellow at Sundance Film Festival and was awarded the Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award for an Emerging Experimental Video Artist at the 2018 Ann Arbor Film Festival. Razan’s work has screened internationally including at HotDocs Film Festival and is in the permanent collection of the Sursock Museum in her hometown Beirut, Lebanon. Her latest short film, "your father was born 100 years old, and so was the Nakba" won the Sunbird Award for Best Narrative Short at Days of Cinema Palestine 2018 and has been acquired by the Palestine Films Collection. She was a 3-year Fulbright scholar pursuing my MFA in Film and Media Arts at Temple University in Philadelphia. She was a mentor at the CAMRA Doc Fellows Program at the University of Pennsylvania and was invited to teach at different universities as a visiting artist including Duke University and Princeton University.
Rula Nasser established her production company The Imaginarium Films in 2010, with a vision to develop and produce globally appealing Arabic content. She started her career in 1999, working on several productions for the BBC and Discovery channels, and Australian television series Survival. She later joined the Royal Film Commission of Jordan and worked with them for five years on their Filmmaker’s Support Program. Nasser has produced more than six feature films in the last four years, including The Last Friday the first Jordanian film to screen at the Berlinale 2011, and My Love Awaits Me by the Sea by Mais Darwazah, which took part in over 30 film festivals including TIFF, and short film Waiting for P.O. Box, which was in the official competition at Cannes in 2012. She was chosen by Variety magazine in 2012, as one of the top Ten Arab Producers to Watch.