Fluid Frames from the Palestinian Diaspora

March 19, 2021 – March 24, 2021

Fluid Frames from the Palestinian Diaspora showcases work from Palestinian filmmakers based in the country known as Canada, featuring filmmakers Muhammad Nour-Elkhairy, Razan Alsalah, Serene Husni, Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, and Rehab Nazzal. This program of provocative films visualizes displacement while exploring the paradox of simultaneously being temporary and permanent as a refugee, the distress Palestinians face from the refusal of right of return to their homeland and the bitter irony of living inside Canada’s settler-colonial state as survivors of settler colonialism themselves.

About the Filmmakers

PROGRAM CURATOR: Muhammad Nour-Elkhairy is a Palestinian filmmaker, video artist and film programmer based in Montreal. A graduate from the MFA in Studio Arts: Film Production at Concordia University, his work is interest in how power relations play out in the daily lives of individuals, and how they are maintained and mediated through Moving images.

Razan AlSalah is a video artist investigating the material-aesthetics of dis/appearance of places and people in colonial image worlds, breaking these thresholds of view into elsewheres here, where colonialism no longer makes sense. Her work has been screened in community-based and international film festivals. She teaches at Concordia University in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.

Serene Husni is a writer, translator & filmmaker. She holds an MFA in Documentary Media from Ryerson University with distinction. Through “The Shoes Project Shorts” and together with Gerda Cammaer, Associate Professor in Film at Ryerson University, Serene is currently co-mentoring six refugee and immigrant women in making personal films centering shoes in their stories of migration to Canada.

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh is a Palestinian-Canadian artist and activist, immersed in community organizing both across Turtle Island and in occupied Palestine. Her work takes interest in the complexity of decolonial disruptions and in drawing attention and care back to the Land. Rana holds an MFA in Documentary Media from Ryerson University and a BA in Human Rights from Carleton University.

Rehab Nazzal is a Palestinian-born multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Toronto. Her video, photography, sound, and installation works examine the image in relation to sound and the enduring human bodies as sites of oppression and sites of resistance. Nazzal’s work has been shown in Canada, Palestine, and internationally in both group and solo exhibitions and screenings.