MENA Film Festival understands the prejudices that our MENA/SWANA community faces such as orientalism and Islamophobia are intrinsically tied to colorism and anti-Black racism from within and outside the community. When we center Black liberation, we work towards liberation for the whole MENA/SWANA community. This panel will discuss how Black and MENA/SWANA identities intersect from Iran to the Arab world and North Africa. How does anti-Black racism lead to the exclusion and erasure of Black identities and histories in the MENA/SWANA region? Through this discourse, how can the non-Black MENA/SWANA community strengthen solidarity and create space for Black experiences? Topics will range from representation in MENA/SWANA film and pop culture to the current events in Sudan and Congo.
Adel Iskandar is a Vancouver-based academic, activist, and public intellectual. He serves as a professor of global communication and Director of the Centre for Comparative Muslims Studies at Simon Fraser University. Iskandar’s research and lecturing touch on creative production, with a commitment to intersectional decolonization and anti-racist epistemology, in the MENA/SWANA region, with cinematic, journalistic, and artistic works screened at international film festivals and globally including full feature documentaries, creative shorts, and television series. Iskandar co-founded the Black Journalists Association of Nova Scotia as well as the Council Against Islamophobia and BIPOC Faculty Working Group at SFU, and has supervised graduate students working on film projects at Georgetown University and SFU's School of Communication.
Niya Ahmed Abdullahi is a Multi-disciplinary Artist, Technologist and the founder of @Habasooda, a collective dedicated to sharing the richness of the Muslim experience. Her work has been exhibited at Nuit Blanche Toronto, TIFF Next Wave, Black Film Festival Zurich, Gallery 44, Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, Eastern Edge Gallery, amongst others. She was a 2021 Hot Docs Accelerator Fellow and currently sits on the advisory committee of the City of Toronto’s ArtworksTO program and the board of Work in Culture. Her work evokes memory, both past, present and future, in connection with diasporic experiences, and ancestral awakenings. Pillars of resistance are drawn through her divine labour of love.
Alex Eskandarkhah is a DGC-nominated director, producer, writer, entrepreneur, actor, and co-founder of the Collective for Black Iranians. His work includes producing over 100 episodes of The Gifted Gab and directing the documentary Coaching While Black, which premiered at the Calgary International Film Festival and Reelworld Film Festival. The project earned two AMPIA nominations and a spot on the DGC Jean-Marc Vallée Discovery Award Long List. Alex has directed short films for the Collective, CBC, and Mosquers Film Festival, and was selected for TELUS Storyhive's Black Creators Edition and the National Screen Institute's EAVE On Demand Access program. His Afro-Iranian heritage and Toronto upbringing influence his storytelling and business ventures. Alex’s latest short film “Cycles" will debut on the festival circuit in 2025, and he is in development on his first narrative feature.
Razan Idris is a Sudanese-American writer, curator of the #SudanSyllabus project, and PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania. Razan's research focuses on race and Blackness in international history with a focus on Afro-Arab identities, and she is currently writing a book on race, media, and modern reporting in early twentieth-century Egypt.
