Zeina Kanawati: How to Tell Our Stories from War Zones
Description
We invite you to a lecture, screening and subsequent discussion with Syrian journalist Zeina Kanawati on how to relate to the traumas of the war – from 18:00 in the Display Gallery.
The lecture will be conducted in English
The lecture, and the discussion will address the question of the impact of war conflicts and militarization on women. Zeina Kanawati will talk about her experience as a journalist, as well as an employee at an NGO which helps Syrian women. How to open the traumas of war conflicts? How to talk and write about them? And do we give enough space for women’s voices to talk about their experiences?
The lecture will be accompanied by a screening of the film by Syrian documentarist Orwa Mokdad called Resurrection:
Two years after the Lebanese General Security confiscated his passport, a filmmaker, returning from Aleppo to complete his first feature film, got stuck in Beirut. The filmmaker tries to finish his film but is unable to complete it because of the hard conditions he and thousands of Syrian refugees suffer from, sometimes even pushing them to commit physical or moral suicide.
The film is a letter from the filmmaker to his producer describing the hard conditions he is passing through and the various versions he imagines where reality mixes up with his concerns and imaginations, and where the borderlines between truth and illusions get lost. The filmmaker imagines Lebanese figures like the poet Khalil Hawi and the director Maroun Baghdadi who lost their lives for psychological or moral reasons, changing into ghosts or spectra and following him throughout the making of the film.
The series of lectures is part of the process of creating the theater project Oh My Gun, which is a collaboration of the theater group 8lidí and the artist Jiří Žák. The project focuses on the past and present of the Czech arms industry. It traces the history of Czech weapons as a means of building diplomatic relations and their export to the Middle East region, especially Syria. Through the theatre’s performative possibilities, the creators of the theater will examine the influence of the Czech Republic, a small semi-peripheral state in the middle of Europe, on the war conflicts of today’s world.
Free Admission
Date
26. 5. 2022, 18:00
Public
Zeina Kanawati
Zeina Kanawati is a Syrian writer and journalist focusing on social issues and women’s rights. She works for Women Now For Development, which is the largest women’s organization working to empower Syrian women in Syria and neighboring countries. Zeina Kanawati was born in Damascus, Syria. She studied English literature at Damascus University and received a diploma in journalism from Prague College. She lives in Prague.
Orwa Al Mokdad
Orwa Al Mokdad is a Syrian writer and filmmaker. He has written screenplays for several films including 300 Miles (2016), which premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival and won the Best First Film prize at the Doclisboa International Film Festival, the Jury Prize at the Olhar International Film Festival and the Edward Snowden Award at the Signos International Festival de la Noite in Paris. Orwa Al Mokdad also writes screenplays for television series and short stories, most recently Madame Suzanne, for which he received The Short Story Prize from the Goethe Institut.