This Friday, May 11 Tunisian singer/songwriter Emel Mathlouthi will be performing at the Berkeley City College Auditorium. Tunisian 30 years old woman got a very good hit in singing during the unisian uprising. Devoted to the cause of the people, she brought a huge emotion to the activists, and gained a respect as an artist [...]
Hamid Naficy, a leading authority on Iranian cinema is Professor of Radio-Television-Film at Northwestern University. He is the author of An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles, and (in Persian) Film-e Mostanad, a two-volume history of nonfiction cinema around the world. Naficy helped to launch [...]
The Iranian film festival will take place in UC Berkeley every weekends of April. This cultural event, organized by UC Berkeley’s Near Eastern Studies Department, will be entirely free. Talks, lectures and screenings by reknowned filmmakers and professors will be programmed. Parviz Sayyad, Hamid Naficy, Bahram Beizai and Sahraa [...]
The SF film society will screen “This is not a film” from the prominent director Jafar Panahi. This coming friday (April 6th) to the 12th, you can watch the movie at the following adress 1746 Post Street (Webster/Buchanan)>
This week on Voices of The Middle East and North Africa, we revisit the situation in Libya. We speak with Libyan Professor Ali Ahmida from the University of New England and professor Gilbert Achcar who teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies. We will also speak to the Guardian’s Africa correspondent, David Smith, about the challenges of reporting from the Libyan capital. Also tonight, the second half of a conversation we had with Egyptian actor and movie director Khaled Abol Naga about his award-wwinning feature film, “Microphone.”
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This week on Voices of the Middle East and North Africa, we talk about democracy in the MENA region; from Tunisia to Egypt, Syria to Iran, to Yemen and Bahrain and Libya. Does this concept extend to Israel and Palestine? Can democracy be reconciled with colonialism or is that a contradiction in terms? We speak with prominent Israeli scholar Dr. Ilan Pappe who in his latest book “Out of The Frame” examines this question in depth. He recounts his political evolution from staunch Zionist as a youngster to liberated humanist as an adult. Ilan Pappe is a long time activist and is a professor of history at the University of Exeter. He is the Co-Director of the Exeter Center for Ethno-Political Studies and director of the European Center for Palestine Studies Center. He is the author of the best selling “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”, “A History of Modern Palestine”, and “The Israel Palestine Question.”
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This week on Voices of The Middle East and North Africa we will be looking at Turkey’s expanding role in the Middle East and North Africa. We will be speaking with Dr. Karem Oktem, a research fellow at the European Studies Center of Saint Anthony’s College about Turkey’s foreign policy in the Middle East and North Africa. Later on in the program, VOMENA producer Shuka Kalantari will speak with Iranian-American author, Firoozeh Kashani of Penn State University about her debut novel ‘Martyrdom Street.’
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The revolutionary spirit endures in Egypt as thousand of protesters stay camped out at Tahrir square for the second week in a row. In response to nationwide protests and the slow pace of reform Egypt’s Prime Minister, Essam Sharaf has fired several of his top ministers.
We continue our conversation with leading Egyptian activist and journalist Hossam El Hamalawy about the prospects for the revolution to flourish and bring about real change.
And in the summer of 1988, over 5000 political prisoners in Iran were executed and dumped into shallow graves in Khavaran cemetery on the outskirts of the capital, Tehran in what was a pre planned and systematic campaign. We will be speaking with Professor Shahla Talebi of Arizona State University and a former political prisoner about her memoir, ‘Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran.’
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This week on Voices of the Middle East and North Africa the revolutionary spirit continues in Egypt as thousands of protesters camped out in Tahrir Square for the sixth day in a row. We speak with leading Egyptian activist and journalist Hossam El Hamalawy about the current protests in Egypt and what the prospects are for the revolution to flourish and bring about real change. We will also talk to Bassam Haddad, co-founder of Jadaliyya online magazine and director of the Middle East Program at George Mason University for an update on the Syrian uprising that started in mid-March.
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