The New York Arab Festival (NYAF) wraps up its second annual this weekend with a special event film screening at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Nine short films will be screened on Sunday, May 28, followed by a panel discussion with Arab Film and Media Institute Director Yasmina Tawil, artist and filmmaker Alia Haju, and visual and performance artist Khaled Jarrar.
NYAF started last April. It was founded by a host of New York City artists, curators, and cultural workers with the goal of preventing the erasure of Arab identity – for people in Arab diasporas in the United States and beyond. The launch of the festival coincided with Arab-American Heritage Month in April and the celebration of Ramadan. Over the past month and a half, the NYAF has present visual art exhibitions, dance performances and concerts throughout the city.
Sunday’s screening will open with director Mariam Mekiwi’s “Before I Forget” (2018), a sci-fi short that explores themes of memory and climate catastrophe. In the film, an oceanographer embarks on a quest to uncover the secrets of an amphibious society. He believes this knowledge will save humanity from a world in the final stages of climate catastrophe, in which the air becomes impossible to breathe. The scientist meets an amphibian woman looking for her mother and two other women who have lost their memories.
Other highlights include director Ziad Abdel-Aal’s “Two Thousand and Thirteen” (2023), a three-minute film set in the aftermath of the Egyptian Revolution, and director Ahaad Alamoudi’s “Hengli” (2020). The second short film is a collaboration between Alamoudi, artist and director, and artist and curator Mengna Da. (Da contributed to Hyperallergic.)
As in “Before I forget,The fictional plot of “Hengli” also focuses on issues of personal and cultural memory. The film takes place in front of an immigration office in Brooklyn in a futuristic world in which the American government has erased individual languages and imposed a new universal means of communication called “hengli”. Alamoudi and Da, who both star in the film, forget how to speak Hengli and are forced to find new ways to communicate, ultimately exploring how language, translation, and the passage of time affect cultural memory.
The Sunday screening is organized in collaboration with the Arab Institute of Cinema and Media and the Moving Image Museum. Cindy Sibilsky, who helped found the festival, will moderate the roundtable. Adult tickets are $15, student and senior tickets are $11, and youth tickets are $9.
