ArabishWay

Movie: Sudan, Remember Us
2025-08-18 19:30 - 21:00, 2025-08-17 17:00 - 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | The Beacon, 4405 Rainier Ave S, Seattle, WA, 98118, United States
In April 2019, filmmaker Hind Meddeb travelled to Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, at a jubilant moment in the country’s history. The long-time dictator Omar Al-Bashir had recently been overthrown after a 30-year regime marked by genocidal violence in Darfur. Meddeb began filming with young activists rallying for a citizen’s government by staging sit-ins, making music, reciting poetry, and painting murals. Their hopes are expressed in signs that read “Sudan free from tribalism” and “religious pluralism.”
For Meddeb, who has family roots in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria, the movement brings to mind the aspirations of her late father: “the dream of an Arab country with its customs shaken up by a feminist revolution.” She captures demonstrations going late into the night with a celebratory atmosphere. The activists are defiant against backlash. “Bullets don’t kill,” says one young man. “What kills is people’s silence.”
SUDAN, REMEMBER US enshrines this moment, but also documents the descent into war that followed. Today, Sudan is engulfed in violence between internal factions in collusion with external arms suppliers driven to gain control over the country’s wealth of minerals. The war has displaced more than 8 million people and killed over 14,000, but is largely ignored by international news. No single film can explain a nation’s complex history or politics. Instead, Meddeb simply bears witness to courageous people receiving scant coverage. Meddeb is always attuned to the power of language—dictators may come and go, but as one activist asserts, “poems are eternal.”

Movie: The Teacher
2025-06-24 16:30 - 19:00, 2025-06-23 19:30 - 21:00, 2025-06-22 17:00 - 19:00
The destruction of a Palestinian home by Israeli edict and the murder of a youth at the hands of an Israeli settler set the stage for even more shocks to come in THE TEACHER. Saleh Bakri is Basem, an amiable educator who tries to steer the deceased boy’s younger brother Adam (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) from seeking revenge. At the same time, Basem ignores his own advice, maintaining ties with the resistance and involving himself in a hostage situation. He tries to keep his activities secret from Adam and his British girlfriend Lisa (Imogen Poots) but it becomes harder to maintain his silence when Israeli troops show up at his door.
THE TEACHER, set and shot with difficulty in occupied territory, is the feature debut of Oscar-nominated and BAFTA-winning British-Palestinian writer-director Farah Nabulsi. Inspired by true events and led by a commanding and wounded performance from Bakri, the film probes the desperate actions of those who feel they have no recourse for justice.

Movie: The Encampments
2025-05-14 16:30 - 18:30, 2025-05-12 16:30 - 18:30, 2025-05-11 20:00 - 22:00, 2025-05-11 17:00 - 19:00, 2025-05-09 16:00 - 18:00, 2025-05-04 11:00 - 13:00, 2025-05-02 16:00 - 17:30, 2025-04-10 19:30 - 21:00 and 4 more dates
THE ENCAMPMENTS follows student organizers at some of the world’s most prestigious universities as they take a historic stand against their institutions’ investments in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, igniting one of the largest student movements in history which continues to have far-reaching effects on US and world policies today.
Filmed on the ground and in real-time as these events were unfolding, THE ENCAMPMENTS features detained student activist Mahmoud Khalil and takes viewers inside America’s student uprising with incredible intimacy and urgency. Professors, whistleblowers from inside Ivy League administrations, and student activists shed light on a moment that captivated the nation’s attention and continues to make headlines today.
“What makes THE ENCAMPMENTS artistically triumphant is its sense of contemporary and historical detail, owed to both footage shot by the filmmakers, as well as by the protesters themselves. In the process, co-directors Kei Pritsker and Michael T. Workman craft a work of cinema that’s as rigorously journalistic in its arguments as it is nakedly sentimental.” – IndieWire
“This is more than a student protest—it’s a generational struggle for justice. Students have always led the charge for justice, from the sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement to the campus protests against South African apartheid. The encampments that started at Columbia are part of that legacy, inspiring millions of people around the world. The film ensures the students in US and Gaza are heard, their actions are remembered, and the fight for Palestinian liberation continues.” – Macklemore
“Khalil remains detained at an ICE facility in Louisiana amid a legal battle to prevent his deportation from the U.S. after the Trump administration ordered his removal… The legal challenge to Khalil might ultimately come down to the Supreme Court, which would decide how far the secretary of state can determine whether a permanent resident can be removed for speech.” – Axios

Movie: Leila and the Wolves at the Beacon
2025-05-04 17:00 - 19:00, 2025-05-02 19:00 - 21:00
Forty years ago, this landmark film by Lebanese director Heiny Srour (THE HOUR OF LIBERATION HAS ARRIVED) centred the less visible stories and histories of women’s resistance in Lebanon and Palestine through an audacious feminist rewriting. Now re-emerging in a new restoration, LEILA AND THE WOLVES revolves around the eponymous Leila (Nabila Zeitouni), a London-based Lebanese woman who, in pondering her future within the limits of the patriarchal imagination, begins to question the long-hidden roles that women have had in Arab history, including how they entwine with the Palestinian resistance movement.
A photography exhibition, organised by a male friend and chronicling the Palestinian struggle, intrigues Leila further. When she questions why there are only photographs of men, he responds casually that women simply weren’t present. Leila’s visceral rejection of this response sets her on a time-travelling journey from the early 1900s to the 1980s, as well as into her own future – or what it will be like if she merely accepts women’s lack of historical agency.
LEILA AND THE WOLVES weaves together fictional drama, memory, myth and archival footage (from sources ranging from the films of Palestinian director Mai Masri to the archives of UNRWA and the Imperial War Museum) to conjure images of active, activist and defiant women – a restitution of sorts, which reverberates around the world. In an interview from 2020, the filmmaker says: “Nowadays, LEILA is travelling the world again, more relevant than ever; my unconscious and the collective unconscious of the women of the Middle East spoke together throughout the extreme conditions of making this film.”
“Heiny Srour’s LEILA AND THE WOLVES is a film of monumental resolve and ambition, determined to address the contradictions within the anti-colonial struggle. With a single actress playing multiple characters in different historical moments, the film dispenses with teleological linearity to emphasize the recurrence of oppression and the consequent need for constant and multifarious opposition. Its restored relevance is not only thematic but methodological: here’s a film that defiantly disregards any moralist binary of good versus evil, us versus them, to champion the immense and composite task that is liberation from all shackles, wherever and whomever we are.” – Celluloid Liberation Front

Movie: The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived
2024-07-17 19:30 - 21:30
THE TEN PILLARS OF BEACON: ARMED STRUGGLE
Cinema can be used as a vessel for resistance, a tool to hasten the breaking of chains, a beacon call for global transformation towards new collectively-forged futures.
In the late 60s, Dhofar rose up against the British-backed Sultanate of Oman, in a democratic, feminist guerrilla movement. Director Heiny Srour and her team crossed 500 miles of desert and mountains by foot, under bombardment by the British Royal Air Force, to reach the conflict zone and capture this rare record of a now mostly-forgotten war.

Spaces of Exception (Film & Discussion)
2024-05-28 19:30 - 21:00
With filmmaker Matt Peterson in attendance for an introduction and Q&A following the screening.

Shot between 2014 to 2017, SPACES OF EXCEPTION observes and juxtaposes the communities and struggles of the American Indian reservation and the Palestinian refugee camp. It visits reservations in Arizona, New Mexico, New York, and South Dakota, as well camps in Lebanon and the West Bank, “places defined by their historical and spiritual resistance” in order to “understand the conditions for life, community, and sovereignty.”

More info and buy tickets (for profit to the theater): https://thebeacon.film/calendar/movie/spaces-of-exception
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Movie: The Old Oak
2024-05-23 16:30 - 18:30, 2024-05-22 16:30 - 18:30, 2024-05-21 16:30 - 18:30, 2024-05-20 16:30 - 18:30, 2024-05-18 13:00 - 15:00, 2024-05-17 16:00 - 18:00, 2024-05-16 16:30 - 18:30, 2024-05-15 19:30 - 21:30 and 1 more date
The Old Oak is a special place. Not only is it the last pub standing in its small northern town, but it’s also the only remaining public space where people can meet in a once thriving mining community that has now fallen on hard times after 30 years of decline. Its owner TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner) hangs on to The Old Oak by his fingertips, and his predicament is endangered even more when the pub becomes contested territory after the arrival of Syrian refugees who are placed in the village without any notice. In an unlikely friendship, TJ meets a curious young Syrian photographer named Yara (Ebla Mari). Together can they find a way for the two communities to understand each other? So unfolds a deeply moving drama about their fragilities and hopes.
