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New York Arab & South Asian Film Festival (NYASAFF) features premieres, documentaries and short films from 25 countries in North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and their diasporas. The mission of the festival is to increase awareness of the creative vitality and sociopolitical realities of North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and their diasporas.
The New York Arab & South Asia Film Festival (NYASAFF) was started in 2003 by Ahmed Issawi and in the beginning, only featured Arab films. It later expanded and included cinema from the rest of the Middle East and South Asia. It was organized by the arts and culture organization Alwan for the Arts based in New York City. The screenings are presented in notable film venues such as: Tribeca Cinemas, Columbia University, Art in General, Cantor Film Center at NYU, and Two Boots Pioneer Theatre. The Film Festival was suspended in 2008, by which point it had grown to become the largest such event outside of the Middle East. The festival is planned to resume in 2012.
In October 2010, Alwan for the Arts and 3rd i organized the New York Arab & South Asian Short Video Slam where they called for submissions by South Asian and Arab directors or submissions of videos about those regions and their diasporas by filmmakers of all backgrounds. Videos of all genre were welcomed, as well as conceptual and political video art. The works of the winners of the Short Video Slam were screened at Alwan's space in downtown New York.
The New York Arab & South Asian Film Festival is partially sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council with the support of The September 11th Fund, as well as the Columbia University Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies, The School of the Arts Film Division, and the Department of Anthropology, The Arab Film Festival Rotterdam, The Tunisian Cultural & Information Center, Egypt Air, and the Arab American Family Support Center. Additional Support from Sankalpa Media, Design Evolution, Deep Dish TV, Earseph Enterprises, Rush Graphics, NYU A/P/A Studies & Institute, Le Souk Restaurant, Damascus Bakery, Sangam Entertainment, RunRon Entertainment Inc., Thatch Caye Resort, Candela, Candela Restaurant, Media Sponsors include: Village Voice, indieWIRE, Rotana TV, Dandana TV, Egyptian National Film Center, Syrian Cinema Foundation, and Arab Radio and Television (ART), Egypt.
The culture of Lebanon and the Lebanese people emerged from various civilizations over thousands of years. It was home to the Phoenicians and was subsequently conquered and occupied by the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, the Arabs, the Crusaders, the Ottoman Turks and the French. This variety is reflected in Lebanon's diverse population, composed of different religious groups, and features in the country's festivals, musical styles, literature, cuisine of Lebanon and architecture of Lebanon. Tourism in Lebanon is popular with periods of interruption during conflict.
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is an experimental filmmaker, artist and author. She is Willa Cather Professor Emerita in Film Studies. Her work has focused on gender, race, ecofeminism, queer sexuality, eco-theory, and class studies. From 1999 through the end of 2014, she was co-editor along with Wheeler Winston Dixon of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. In 2016, she was named Willa Cather Endowed Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and took early retirement in 2020.
Middle Eastern Cinema collectively refers to the film industries of Western Asia and part of North Africa. By definition, it encompasses the film industries of Iran, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestine, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. As such, the film industries of these countries are also part of the cinema of Asia, or in the case of Egypt, Africa.
Khaled Muhammad Samy Abol Naga, credited as Khaled Abol Naga and by the mononym Kal Naga, is an Egyptian actor, director and producer. He is recognized primarily for his work in Egypt and the Middle East, but has increasingly ventured into American and British film and television roles. He started acting and directing plays and musicals in Egypt while studying theatre at The American University in Cairo. Beginning his professional acting career in 2000, Naga starred in several movies through the next decade with roles encompassing several genres, from musicals None but that! (2007), action Agamista (2007), Eyes Of A Thief (2014), thrillers Kashf Hesab (2007), art-house Heliopolis (2009), Villa 69 (2013), Decor (2014), and slapstick comedy Habibi Naêman (2008). Additionally, he has participated in several European film festivals, where he received a range of awards as an actor and producer. Since 2016, he has acted in several English-speaking roles, such as Tyrant on FX, History Channel's Vikings, and the BBC's TV mini-series The Last Post, and announced to appear in the upcoming Netflix Show Messiah 2019. In a film festival in 2016 that celebrated Arab film submissions to the Oscars, he was noted as being the most submitted actor in Arabic films submissions to the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He is often tagged in western media as "Egypt's Brad Pitt", and he has also been described as "the next Omar Sharif" especially after his American debut movie Civic Duty in 2007. Chosen as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF in 2007, Naga played a pivotal role in child rights awareness, as well as the very first HIV awareness campaigns in Egypt and the Arab world, and participated in several international causes, including advocating for democracy in his home country Egypt. He is one of the most recognizable celebrity faces of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, taking part in mass demonstrations in Cairo that led to the removal of President Mubarak. He faced defamation campaigns against him by the state-owned media during the Mubarak era before the January 25th, 2011 revolution in Egypt, and several times again from the 2013 "coup d'etat" General Sisi government in Egypt in retaliation for his advocacy about the deterioration of human rights situation in Egypt.
Arab cinema or Arabic cinema refers to the cinema of the Arab world.
The cinema of Lebanon, according to film critic and historian Roy Armes, is the only other cinema in the Arabic-speaking region, beside Egypt's, that could amount to a national cinema. Cinema in Lebanon has been in existence since the 1920s, and the country has produced more than 500 films.
Professor Ella Shohat teaches at the departments of Art & Public Policy and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies at New York University.
Emily Jacir is a Palestinian artist and filmmaker.
Annemarie Jacir is a Palestinian filmmaker, writer, and producer.
Oday Rasheed is an Iraqi film director and writer. He studied at the Institute for Electrical Science as well as the Faculty of Applicable Arts in Baghdad, both of which he quit early to dedicate himself to cinema. For a while he worked as freelance writer, writing essays and film reviews in Baghdad.
Youssef Nabil was born on the 6th of November 1972. He is an Egyptian artist and photographer. Youssef Nabil began his photography career in 1992 by staging tableaux in which his subjects acted out melodramas recalling film stills from the golden age of Egyptian cinema. Later in the 1990s, while working as a photographers' assistant in studios in New York and Paris, he began photographing artists and friends, producing both formal portraits as well as placing his subjects in the realms of dreams and sleep, on the edge of awareness, far from their daylight selves.
Alwan for the Arts is a 501c3 nonprofit Arts & Culture organization that promotes understanding of, and fosters appreciation for, the diversity of cultural experiences and representations of the Arab world and of South Asia. Alwan for the Arts strives to create a platform to reflect the artistic expressions and intellectual production of the regions and their diasporas and allow New Yorkers, both Middle Eastern and non-Middle Eastern, to enjoy the arts from that region of the world.
The Arab Image Foundation is a non-profit organization established in Beirut in 1997. It aims to track down, collect, preserve and study photographs from the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora. Its expanding collection includes more than 600,000 photographic objects from Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Iraq, Iran, Mexico, Argentina, and Senegal.
A growing number of film festivals are held in the Middle East to showcase films from the region as well as international standouts. In addition, institutions and organizations in other parts of the world are increasingly honoring the new generation of filmmakers in the Middle East with Arab film festivals.
Haig Papazian is a Lebanese-Armenian multidisciplinary artist, composer, and architect born in Beirut and currently based out of New York. He is a founding member and violinist of Lebanese pop band Mashrou' Leila.
GoNightclubbing is a collaboration between video artists Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong, who worked together to document the New York punk rock scene beginning in 1977. Ivers had previously worked with Metropolis Video from 1975 until their dissolution in 1977. Originally, Ivers and Armstrong were known as Advanced TV, but they incorporated as GoNightclubbing in 2001.
Prerana Reddy is a New York-based activist involved with community engagement who works in many different areas and disciplines. Reddy is currently the Director of Public Events at the Queens Museum, where she organizes screenings, performances, discussions, and community-based collaborative programs and exhibits both on and off-site. Reddy has been engaged in the Queens community for many years, and has developed various programs and initiatives for immigrants, youth, non-English speakers, etc. Reddy is involved in the intersection of art and community, having co-curated the exhibition "Fatal Love: South Asian American Contemporary Art Now", as well as coordinated two editions of "Corona Plaza: Center of Everywhere", which commissioned eight artists to develop public art works that engage local residents on issues of neighborhood history and identity as well as tensions around its various transformations. Reddy's involvement in programs that engage communities include the access to language aid, healthcare, public space advocacy, and financial aid. Reddy received the Douglas Redd Fellowship for emerging leaders in the arts and community development sector, funded by the Ford Foundation and administered through Partners for Livable Communities.
Firas Abou Fakher is a Lebanese composer, musician, producer and writer. He is best known as a composer, guitarist, and keyboardist with indie rock band Mashrou' Leila and the co-founder of Last Floor Productions.
Rasha Salti is a researcher, writer, producer, and curator of art and film. She lives and works between Beirut and Berlin. Salti co-curated many film programs at public institutions, including ArteEast, Lincoln Center and Museum of Modern Art in New York, and collaborated with film festivals as a programmer, such as the Abu Dhabi International Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival. Since 2017, she is the commissioning editor for La Lucarne at ArteFrance, a program dedicated to Auteur documentaries. Her curatorial projects were exhibited at numerous international public institutions, including Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende in Santiago de Chile, the Sursock Museum in Beirut.
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