In collaboration with Habibi Collective, a digital film archive that celebrates the work of female filmmakers from the Middle East and North Africa, Sharjah Art Foundation is presenting a series of online film screenings, to launch tomorrow, May 29th. 

The screenings will feature award-winning short and feature-length narrative, documentary and experimental films by female artists from the Arab world. The first programme of films, screening on 29 May at 8:30 UAE time, is titled ‘In the Name of Love: Self-identification in MENA Female Cinema,’ with future screenings scheduled for June 12th and 26th.

“Beyond issues of representation, filmmaking has offered itself as a tool for women to explore their own subjectivity and sense of becoming,” reads the event’s description. “The five films in this programme deconstruct mainstream narratives of maternal bonds, beauty standards, love stories, cooking and the archiving of memories. They offer alternative ways of seeing by rewriting visual codes through the eyes of the traditional ‘other’.”

The five films being screened tomorrow are:

1. The Story of Milk and Honey (2011)
Director: Basma Alsharif
Lebanon

2. Clams Casino (2018)
Director: Pam Nasr
United States

3. The Fall of the Standard of Beauty: The Iranian Nose (2019)
Director: Sahar Ghorishi
United Kingdom

4. Staff of Life (2019)
Director: Moza Almatrooshi
United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom

5. Chergui (2019)
Director: Chahine Fallahi
Morocco

You can tune in here to watch, and more details are available here.