São Paulo – The 20th edition of the Arab World Film Festival taking place this year will feature 17 films, including 12 premieres. Created by the Institute for Arab Culture (Icarabe) and held via a partnership between CineSesc and Banco do Brasil Cultural Center, the event is sponsored by the Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce. The films will be shown at CineSesc from August 13 to 19 and at Banco do Brasil Cultural Center from August 16 to September 7.
The festival opener “All That’s Left of You,” by the Palestinian American director Cherien Dabis, will be shown at 8 pm on Wednesday (13). Arab Chamber board member and event curator Arthur Jafet told ANBA that the festival has reached its 20th anniversary as a space of listening, memory, and presence.
“Throughout these 20 years, we have been able to build symbolic bridges between Brazil and the Arab world not just through representation, but also through a living, plural filmic language that is often marginalized by traditional circuits,” he argues.
According to Jafet, the featured productions have been selected along four curatorial buckets: image and archive retrieval, listening in daily life, family heritage, and symbolic reconstruction. He also says that with each new edition, the event sets out to “give a voice” to the different layers of the experience, whether that be of memory or of territorial occupation.
The full program, including the venues’ addresses, is available here.
Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
