To register for this event please click here.
To view the film trailer please click here.
All times are US EST. The film screening will be followed with Q&As discussions with film director Doris Hakim.
About the Film
2021; 28 Minutes, Arabic, English, Hebrew with English Subtitles (large & clear).
“Liwan” is a documentary about the cultural space of the same name in Nazareth. Producer and Director Doris Hakim first met the founders of Liwan – Sami Jabali, Sally Azzam and Silke Wanner – back in 2016, when an exhibition she was to put on in Nazareth was banned. They came out to support her, and she immediately fell in love with them and with Liwan.
Opening and running Liwan has been a constant struggle for its founders. The space has been attacked in the past, and they were threatened constantly.
An Israeli government “redevelopment” project in the late 1990s shut down most businesses in the souq for many years. After the market reopened, it had lost much of its life. Liwan triggered other new cultural spaces to open and create a type of cultural resistance movement that focussed on the Palestinian identity that was denied them by the State of Israel.
In addition, Liwan’s activities promote political tourism, where visitors actually engage with the local Palestinian Arab population, and more specifically political tours led by a local journalist, Jonathan Cook, around Nazareth and nearby destroyed Palestinian villages.
Palestinians are a minority inside the state of Israel, and their culture has been deliberately and systematically marginalised by the Israeli state. Consequently, another major goal for Liwan is to support and promote local Palestinian culture, selling Palestinian products, by hosting concerts by local Palestinian musicians, poetry readings, art exhibitions, showings of films, and acting as a meeting point for tours visiting Palestinian heritage.
About the Filmmaker
Doris Hakim is a visual artist, she was born in Nazareth to a Palestinian father and a Greek mother from Chania Crete. This background played an important role in her artistic development, triggering her to explore the effects and conception of society, religion, and politics, focusing on the meaning of issues such as democracy, equality, and boundaries.
Hakim left Nazareth and moved to Greece aged 20. She studied Theology and then Fine Arts. Moving to Spain, she continued with an MA degree and is currently undertaking a PhD.
Hakim's complex and diverse origins combine both the richness and the violence of the cultural context she grew into. She deals with these issues in an attempt to reconcile herself with her culture and its socio-political boundaries, all the while engaging herself in the culture of others. The abuse of religious, political and psychological power, can be seen in her art, through the hiding and revealing of symbols.