This festival uses fictional stories, experimental approaches, art as sociology, and contemporary cinema, to bring together filmmakers, theatre-makers, photographers, dancers, and visual artists whose work explores migration, exile, memory, catastrophe, labor, cultural survival, and belonging. Through fiction, documentary, theatre-film, dance-film, and experimental contemporary work, artists preserve stories often missing from official histories and archives.
The Amplification Project: Women Artists of the Arab Diaspora (Detroit), Curated by Biba Sheikh and Kathy Carbone, explores forced migration, cultural survival, and life between geographies through works by contemporary Arab women artists connected to Detroit.
One of Shaker's best-known experimental films, home. not home. explores the unstable relationship between home, displacement, and memory. Rather than presenting a linear narrative, the film moves through images, text, and fragments that evoke the experience of existing between multiple places and identities. The work reflects on what home becomes when it is remembered, imagined, inherited, or lost.
The film's fragmented structure mirrors the experience of diaspora itself. Personal memory, family history, and questions of belonging emerge through a poetic visual language that resists fixed definitions of nation, identity, and place. It is particularly relevant to discussions of migration, intergenerational memory, and the emotional geography of exile.
on silence is an experimental film combining moving image, spoken word, and music. The work was presented within programs focused on Arab American experimental cinema and was also screened in a festival segment devoted to Syria. The film investigates silence as both absence and presence, considering what remains unspoken in the aftermath of violence, migration, and historical rupture.
Rather than documenting events directly, Shaker uses poetic imagery and language to approach memory through suggestion and atmosphere. The work asks how silence functions within personal and collective histories and how artists can engage experiences that resist direct representation.
The Arabic word bayt means both "house" and "home," and this dual meaning lies at the center of on bayt: a film in fragments. Developed alongside writing, photography, and installation work, the film uses fragments of text, photographs, domestic spaces, and memory to explore Arab American experiences of home and homeland.
The film investigates how identity is constructed through family stories, language, inherited memory, and the spaces people inhabit. By working through fragments rather than a single narrative, Shaker creates a meditation on migration, belonging, and the continuing presence of ancestral places within contemporary life.
In this intimate video, Palestinian American artist and author Leila Abdelrazaq reflects on the experiences that have shaped both her life and her distinctive practice in comics and illustration. Growing up within the Palestinian diaspora, Abdelrazaq considers family history, displacement, inherited memory, and the continuing Palestinian struggle, and how these realities enter the personal language of her work. Her comics have become a means of preserving stories across generations, most notably in Baddawi, which draws upon her father's childhood in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and transforms family memory into a visual archive. Abdelrazaq brings the personal and political into the same frame, using comics not only to remember, but to resist erasure and make complicated histories accessible to others.
After being forced to flee, Dardas returned decades later to the grounds of her former home, only to find that the house was no longer there. What remained were pieces of bricks, debris, earth, and the physical memory of a place once inhabited. Dardas used these fragments to create site specific artwork on the grounds. Created in collaboration with artist Na Forest Lim.
Zina Hakeem is a Syrian visual artist and filmmaker living in Lebanon whose work moves between painting, moving image, and experimental cinema. Her films often draw upon personal memory, displacement, psychological landscapes, and the experience of survival amid uncertainty.
Working at the intersection of visual art and film, Hakeem creates poetic works that blur documentary and experimental forms, using image, gesture, and atmosphere to explore questions of identity, exile, and belonging.
An experimental study of opposites, OPPOSISMS explores the shifting boundaries between seemingly contrary states—pleasure and pain, this and that. Through an experimental approach, Fahoome questions the lines we draw between opposing experiences and what happens when those distinctions begin to dissolve.
The short film featuring 2025 Kresge Artist Fellow and painter Malak Cherri is part of the 2026 Kresge Artist Showcase series. Produced by 7 Cylinders Studio and Kresge Arts in Detroit in collaboration with Reel Clever Films, the 2-to-4-minute vignette explores Cherri’s detailed painting practice and her philosophy on capturing intimate, everyday life moments.
Bringing together Razaan Killawi, Jenin Yaseen (sr7aneh), and Chloé Hajjar, this conversation explores the intimate point at which lived experience becomes artistic language, and the ways the act of making can transform how an artist understands herself and the world around her. Moving through diasporic longing, inherited and fragmented memory, Palestinian belonging, impermanence, preservation, and the tension between technology and the natural world, the artists consider creation as both an act of vulnerability and transformation. The discussion asks what happens internally when memory, loss, displacement, discovery, and uncertainty pass through the artist and emerge in another form—and what the artist ultimately hopes to leave behind for others. In keeping with The Amplification Project exhibition's idea of the inner crucifixion and rebirth of the artist, the conversation moves from the deeply personal origins of each practice toward art's capacity to preserve what is disappearing, create belonging, and transform absence into something that can continue to live.
Set in Detroit's Arab American community, Detroit Unleaded follows Sami, a young Lebanese American who is forced to take over his family's gas station after the death of his father. Working behind bulletproof glass in a city marked by economic hardship and social divisions, Sami struggles between family obligations, personal aspirations, and a growing romance that challenges community expectations.
Both romantic comedy and social portrait, the film offers a rare depiction of everyday Arab American life in Detroit and Dearborn. Rather than focusing on conflict or stereotypes, Rola Nashef explores questions of identity, belonging, cultural expectations, and the experience of navigating multiple worlds at once.
Sound of August is a fiction film set against the emotional and psychological aftermath of the Beirut Port explosion. Through personal stories unfolding in a city transformed by catastrophe, the film examines grief, memory, loss, and the struggle to continue living after collective trauma.
Rather than focusing solely on the event itself, the film explores what remains afterward: damaged landscapes, fractured relationships, and the lingering echoes of a disaster that altered Beirut's social and emotional fabric.
A brief cinematic meditation on language, communication, and the expressive possibilities contained within the written word. Symphony of Letters approaches letters not simply as carriers of meaning, but as elements of rhythm, image, and human expression, creating a compact visual composition around the ways we communicate and connect.
A new life, a new silence. As Badih moves through the quiet rhythm of his days, something appears, something he can’t explain. He follows it through empty streets, sleepless nights, and fragments of another life. Between what is here and what is gone, the distance begins to take its toll.
A short, contemplative work exploring silence as a space in which memory, emotion, and what remains unspoken can surface. Through an economical cinematic language, Echoes of Silence considers how absence itself can communicate, allowing image, atmosphere, and stillness to carry what words cannot.
Birth Underneath the Rubble grows from community-based theatre developed with participants in Palestinian refugee camps. Adapted from a theatre script originating in Detroit, the work is reshaped through the performers’ own environments, histories, language, and concerns. Its filmed form carries local testimony beyond the stage, transforming displacement, loss, and daily survival into a collective act of memory.
Rather than treating the camp only as a site of suffering, the film emphasizes the people who continue to create, speak, and imagine within it. The title evokes the possibility that voice, solidarity, and new cultural life can emerge even from conditions of destruction.
Seeds of Eternity is part of Birds of the Coming Dawn, a collaborative theatre-film project developed with artists and community participants in Palestinian refugee camps. The project began with a community theatre script from Detroit, which each participating director reshaped through local culture, environment, stories, and concerns.
Atwa’s film transforms this community-based performance into a cinematic testimony of collective memory, cultural survival, and the capacity to create new life through theatre even under conditions of displacement.
Drawing on Fuglsang’s lifelong practice as a mime artist and performer, See You enters the refugee camp through corporeal expression, gesture and nearly wordless encounters. Filmed during her time in Lesbos, the work looks at how the body can become a language when words fall away, and how mime, movement and creative expression can reveal the humanity, resilience and overlooked potential of people living behind the camp’s fences.
In Nour’s Dream, the stone is transformed from a silent object into a storyteller carrying the many layers of Palestinian memory, culture, resistance, and everyday life. Moving poetically from the ancient stones of Acre and the ruins of the homeland to children’s games, taboon ovens, grinding stones, prison walls, and acts of resistance, the film reveals how a seemingly ordinary material can hold an entire history. Guided by Nour’s dream, each stone opens onto another story, connecting land, memory, daily life, and cultural survival. More than a documentation of the past, the film becomes a sensory meditation on the enduring relationship between Palestinians and place—where every stone carries memory and becomes evidence of a continuing presence.
Those Who Rise is an archival montage dedicated to the memory of Palestinian filmmaker Hani Jawhariyya and to the continuing life of his ideas. The film connects images of the past with the urgency of the present, reflecting on sacrifice as an ongoing history and on earlier generations as a source of meaning for contemporary resistance.
Developed through discussions about the meaning of image and sound and their place within struggles for resistance and human liberation, the work considers cinema itself as a form of testimony. It establishes a foundation for future projects inspired by Jawhariyya’s commitment to documenting Palestinian experience.
Set on the Greek island of Lesbos during one of the largest refugee movements of recent decades, Citizen Xenos examines the lives of refugees arriving on Europe's shores alongside the volunteers and local residents who encounter them. The film captures moments of uncertainty, resilience, and human connection amid a rapidly changing humanitarian landscape.
Rather than offering a distant political analysis, the documentary focuses on lived experience. Questions of citizenship, belonging, hospitality, and displacement emerge through intimate encounters between strangers whose lives become unexpectedly intertwined.
Based on actor David Malteze’s personal experience as a Georgian immigrant in Greece, Empirical Data examines a person’s relationship with an environment experienced as alien and often hostile. As the central character seeks social acceptance, he appears to change in order to enter the new environment. His trajectory moves from arrival in Greece to acting, professional recognition, and eventual integration into Greek society.
Description adapted from George Drivas’s official project text.
Laboratory of Dilemmas is a narrative sound-and-video installation based on Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women. It considers the conflict between protecting the Foreigner and preserving the safety of the Native. The work presents fragments of an unfinished documentary about an incomplete scientific experiment, revealing the professor’s hopes and disagreements with his fellow researchers. Its story originally unfolded through multiple image and sound sources within a labyrinth.
Description adapted from George Drivas’s official project text.
22 former Lebanese detainees reconstructing Tadmor Prison inside an abandoned school near Beirut and reenacting their experiences, sometimes taking the roles of both prisoner and jailer.
“Light is the first eye.”— Khalil Khaled (Lilo)
War transformed his study of light: electricity gave way to flame, shadow, and sky. Working across Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, he learned to treat available light, the street, and human encounter as both material and method.
Continue reading: The Lighter of LightKhalil Khaled (Lilo) began studying light while training in theatre in Damascus. A path through lighting and technical arts led him into the Opera House, international touring productions, theatre, photography, cinematography, and eventually filmmaking.
War altered that education. Electricity gave way to flame, shadow, and sky. Moving through Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, and often working with little equipment, he developed an approach in which available light, the street, and human encounter became both material and method.
His photographs move between performance and daily life: people caught in thresholds, actors isolated by light, children and animals encountered in the street, and the recurring circular frame that turns looking itself into part of the image.
Created while Khalil was working on lighting design and cinematography for Ibrahim Fino’s Palestinian film Anat, the image depended on waiting for sunlight to pierce an abandoned West Bank site and shaping that light with an old smoke machine rather than professional cinema equipment.
During a West Bank dance-film shoot, concentrated light revealed only a young girl’s shadow. Khalil preserved the image as an artistic reflection on children whose individual stories disappear inside the scale and abstraction of war.
Working with a single bulb and shattered glass, Khalil uses the prism as a metaphor: one source of light opening into many possibilities. The work connects experimentation with identity, fracture, survival, and his continuing study of light under conditions of scarcity.
This community theatre project connects Detroit and Palestine through performance, lighting, and cinematography. Khalil’s images emphasize human connection across distance and the possibility of art as a bridge between cultures, borders, and lived realities.
