São Paulo – After screening in Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, São Paulo and Recife, the Arab Women’s Film Festival arrives this year in Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s Minas Gerais state. Running from Wednesday (27) through Sunday (31), the program brings together films produced by Arab women directors both within and outside their countries of origin. The films will be shown at Cine Santa Tereza, with free admission.
According to information from the festival organizers, this year’s edition aims to present a retrospective of the films that marked the first five editions of the festival in other Brazilian cities. The curators are Analu Bambirra and Carol Almeida.
“We had already experimented with creating parallels between the cinematography of Brazilian women filmmakers and Arab women filmmakers during the festival’s fifth edition, and it worked very well, because when we place these films in direct dialogue within the same screening, we realize there are aesthetic and political alliances that bring our audiovisual experience closer to what women directors from the Arab world have been doing for many years,” Carol Almeida said in a statement.
The opening screening will feature Sudan, Remember Us (2024), by Hind Meddeb. A production from France, Qatar and Tunisia—the director’s home country—the feature film portrays the struggle of a generation of Sudanese people for freedom amid conflict. Meanwhile, The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (2011) presents an essay on Egyptian actress Soad Hosni and the construction of the modern Arab woman in Egyptian cinema. The film is directed by Lebanese filmmaker Rania Stephan. Also showing will be the animated film My Homeland (2024) by Iraqi Swiss director Tabarak Abbas.
The festival also seeks to foster closer ties between Arab and Brazilian cinema through the “Minas–Arab World Dialogues” section, centered on themes such as memory and displacement. Films to be screened include Memory of the Land (2013) by Palestinian filmmaker Samira Badran, Febre 40° (2021) by Brazilian director Natália Reis, and Party on the CAPS (2018) by Moroccan filmmaker Meriem Bennani. The program will also feature panel discussions following some screenings, as well as special attention to Palestinian productions and directors—a hallmark of Arab film festivals held in Brazil.
The full program and further information are available at this link.
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Translated by Guilherme Miranda
