Screening Rights  Film Festival 2024:  Neo Nahda +  Casa Izabel + Q&A

On the opening night of its 10th anniversary, the Screening Rights Film Festival is staging a special event centred around queer archives and reenactments from Lebanon and Brazil. 

In French-Lebanese filmmaker May Ziadé’s Neo Nahda, Mona, a young woman in modern-day London, goes down a rabbit hole of amateur research after coming across photographs of Arab women cross-dressing in 1920s Lebanon. Rich with photographic influences — Maryam Şahinyan, Van Leo, and Marie al-Khazen come to mind — Neo Nahda fuses together images discovered by Ziadé in the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut with inventions of her own. The result is an electrifying queer renaissance of sorts, hinted at in the film’s title (Nahda being the Islamic modernist movement — ‘the Awakening’ — of the early 20th century).

Created in a similarly playful dialogue with the queer narratives of the past, Gil Baroni’s Casa Izabel was loosely inspired by the real-life story of Casa Susanna, a bungalow hidden in the woods of upstate New York where a group of transgender women and cross-dressing men would clandestinely convene and find refuge in the mid-20th century. While its function largely remains the same, in Baroni’s colourful, Almodóvarian comedic thriller, Casa is transported to the depths of the Brazilian forest of the 1960s. The story of the original Casa is given a deliciously dark twist, complicated by jealousy, racial and class tensions, and lurking political intrigue à la Kiss of the Spider Woman. It is a work of speculative fiction that is as indebted to Casa Susanna as it is to the tradition of Brazilian anti-fascist resistance.

Equal parts vivid reconstruction and ingenious fictionalisation of the narratives that have been suppressed or underrepresented due to the turbulent histories of the Middle East and Latin America, Ziadé’s and Baroni’s films, each in their unique way, outline queer genealogies and combat epistemic oblivion.

The screening will be accompanied by a video introduction from Casa Izabel’s director, Gil Baroni, and followed by a discussion featuring invited guests. The panellists will include May Ziadé (the filmmaker behind Neo Nahda), guest curator Daniel Zacariotti (Film and TV PhD candidate at Warwick), the Queer Research Network (Airelle Amedro, Aman Sinha, and Polina Zelmanova, all PhD candidates at Warwick), and Misha Zakharov (curator at Screening Rights and Film & TV PhD candidate at Warwick).

The event is funded by the Warwick Institute of Engagement. It is being directed by Professor Michele Aaron, curated by Misha Zakharov (PGR in Film & TV Studies) and coordinated by Dr Pablo Alvarez Murillo.