Masāfāt: Re-Imagining the Urban in Arabic Film

As part of Masāfāt, this panel discussion looks at the cinematic representations of cities such as Beirut and Cairo after the revolution, popular representations of the city during the Arab Spring and in the West Bank, and science fictional/dystopian visions of the Middle Eastern urban landscape and society in experimental film practices.

Speakers include Arash Nassiri, Caroline Rooney, Larissa Sansour and Anastasia Valassopoulos.

French-Iranian filmmaker Arash Nassiri is winner of the Press Award, Les Enfants Terribles, Huy, Belgium (2014); the Best Experimental Short Film Award, festival Côté-Court Pantin, Paris, France (2014); and the RMIT University Award for Best Experimental Short Film, Melbourne Int. Film Festival, Australia (2015). His film works have been exhibited at the Triennale of Istabul (2010), the Venice Architecture Biennial, the Biennale de Lyon as part of the Palais de Tokyo group exhibition Le Parfait Flâneur (2015), Fundacio Sunnol, Barcelona (2016) and the Shanghai Himalaya Museum (2016)

Caroline Rooney is Professor of African and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Kent and UK principal investigator of the Newton-Mosharafa programme Egypt’s Living Heritage: Community Engagement in Recreating the Past, mounted in collaboration with Egyptian colleagues Mostafa Gad and Fekri Hassan. She is the co-director of the arts documentary White Flags (Beirut, 2014), and with William Parry the co-director of The Living Martyrs: Palestinian Prisoners in Israeli Jails (2015).

Larissa Sansour was born in 1973 in East Jerusalem, Palestine, and studied fine arts in London, New York and Copenhagen. Her work is immersed in the current political dialogue and utilises video, photography, installation and sculpture. Central to her work is the tug and pull between fiction and reality. Recent solo exhibitions include New Art Exchange in Nottingham, Mosaic Rooms in London, Turku Art Museum in Finland, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Photographic Center in Copenhagen, Kulturhuset in Stockholm, Lawrie Shabibi in Dubai, Sabrina Amrani in Madrid and DEPO in Istanbul.

Anastasia Valassopoulos is Lecturer in World Literature at the University of Manchester. Her main area of research is in the postcolonial literature and culture of the Middle East and North Africa. She is also interested in the wider cultural production and reception of Arab women's film and music. Valassopoulos has worked and published on the revolutionary cinema of the PLO and on the role of Egyptian popular culture and revolution. Her most recent long term project is a visual cultural history of Palestine entitled 'Palestine in the Popular Imagination'.

Masāfāt Music Pass: attend all four Masāfāt music events for £40

Masāfāt is a two-part festival taking place in London and Cairo this September. The festival is designed to create an open-ended, international platform to foster artistic and professional exchange between independent artists and professionals across the Middle East, North Africa and the UK.