Our February screening highlights the work of Queer Arab artists. Dayna Ash, funder and executive producer of Haven for Artist will join us for an online Q&A. Dayna is the powerful writer and voice-over of Courage.

Courage جرأة (2021, Lebanon)is an experimental short film comprised of eight acts in poetic form written by Dayna Ash, and directed by Malak Mroueh. The film tackles identity, freedom, and queer being in the Middle East, where the dominating discourse aims to dim and erase their existence. The “closet” is portrayed as a labyrinth of societal norms and traditions that bodies must navigate to survive, rendering coming out and the spectrum in-between as equally courageous acts.

Baba (Adam Ali & Sam Arbor, 2021, UK): Rejected by his family for his queerness and oppressed by his country for the same, reckless Libyan teenager “Britannia” gets an interview at the British Embassy, taking him one step closer to his childhood dream of stepping foot on Manchester’s Canal Street, the pulsing queer centre of the world. Being British and gay is everything he’s ever dreamed of. But he needs his passport. Plagued by memories of his oppressive Baba but supported by his found family of queers, he sneaks back to the family house to retrieve it. There, an unexpected discovery strikes deep and forces him to question where his dreams truly lie.
Adam Ali (they/them) is a British Libyan actor and director striving to celebrate queer Muslim visibility. Baba won the top prize at Iris Prize LGBT+ Film Festival in Cardiff.

La Casquette (Hadi Moussally, 2022, France): Hadi stares at the camera and begins to get dressed. As he prepares himself, he expresses his thoughts on the current situation, how much discrimination and amalgams weigh on him, he who wears the double stigmatizing hat of gay & Arab. What to do with this weight?

Bellydance Vogue (Hadi Moussally, 2020, France): Hadi’s birthday landed on the 3rd of April, 2020, during lockdown, and for the first time he celebrated it all by himself.
Hadi Moussally is a Lebanese-French filmmaker. In 2015, he co-founded the production company “h7o7” whose main objective is to enable the making and promotion of films and photos with “hybrid” vocation where is privileged the mixture of genres between fashion, experimental, documentary and fiction. In 2020, he founded “Hybrid Wave” with more than 30 hybrid artists from all around the world.

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