The Arab Women’s Film Festival in Brazil, since its first edition in 2019, has the goal of searching and amplifying the access to films directed by Arab women, living in the Arab world or in diaspora.

The curatorial team, formed by Brazilians Analu Bambirra and Carol Almeida, and by Egyptian Alia Ayman, aims at non-hegemonic artistic and narrative aesthetics. We direct our gaze at narrative, documentary and experimental films, working to share to the audience this plurality of formats and aesthetics. As we propose this focus, we desire to erase the orientalist idea of “oppressed women”, as much as the presumption of the Arab world as a region without filmic culture. More than that: we aim at putting the directors at the center of the debate: their production contexts and aesthetic proposals.

It is important to note that, since its first edition, the Arab Women’s Film Festival in Brazil has always paid special attention to Palestinian filmmakers and that, in recent years, with the worsening of the process of ethnic cleansing that the Palestinian people are going through – now hyper-visible and in unimaginable proportions of violence – we have firmly established ourselves as a film festival for the liberation of Palestine.

Our festival joins the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, and we hope that colleagues at film festivals, art spaces and cultural institutions would do the same. Boycott works, and it is in all honesty, the least we can do as artists and cultural practitioners. For more information, follow BDS Brazil: https://linktr.ee/bdsbrasil