You Don't Own This War: Arab Women's Cinema Showcase

With only nine films, “Here and Now: Contemporary Arab Women Filmmakers,” a film series exhibited in August 2019 at Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox, is inevitably limited in the variety of style, form, and storytelling it can convey. However, by highlighting both the diversity and intersectionality of identities, the films presented are linked by a compelling thematic thread: they all investigate how cinema represents Arab women with a focus on the body, its materiality, and the power relations that determine it. Although each film reflected its local political and socio-economic context, collectively these films by Arab women utilized the body as a mediated object with the potential to destabilize, disrupt, and transform.