Mediterranean Fire Art · 2016–2026
Fictional stories, experimental approaches, art as sociology, and contemporary cinema about migration, exile, memory, catastrophe, labor, cultural survival, and belonging.
Saturday + Sunday
The main event
Three days of film, artists, and dialogue connecting Detroit’s Arab diaspora with filmmakers and cultural voices from across the world.
Explore the festival program ↗
September 11–13, 2026
Film screenings, artist encounters, public dialogue, photography, and contemporary forms of memory at the Detroit Historical Museum.
Read the full program ↗Films & artists in focus
Featured Photographer
Photography as a viewfinder: light, movement, public life, and layered memory.
Panel Discussion
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.
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.
Summer 2026 · Detroit Historical Museum
Before the film festival, Mediterranean Fire created two major chapters at the Detroit Historical Museum, bringing visual art, poetry, sound, and music into one season of memory, resistance, and renewal.
A living archive of art shaped by forced migration, displacement, and cultural survival. Artworks, installation, film, poetry, hakawati-inspired narration, and ambient sound trace arcs of rupture, resilience, and rebirth.
View the exhibition at Detroit Historical Museum ↗A multidisciplinary performance bringing together a quintet of Arabic musicians, women poets of the Arab diaspora, Belgian soundscape composition, and immersive visual projections in a meditation on land, memory, environmental devastation, exile, and resilience.
Poetry: Kamelya Omayma Youssef · Ibaa Ismail · Biba Sheikh
Musical direction: Laith Alattar · Didier Nietsche
Film imagery: Zina Hakeem
September 11–13, 2026