Arts Activities Support

The majority of survey respondents indicated that the films viewed were important to their communities and themselves. As predicted, the festival was also able to provide a platform to 30 Arab and Arab American filmmakers, not to mention the cast and crew involved with the films. The festival also attracted 1,500 audience members, and increase of 25% over the previous year's festival. Our main goal was to successfully produce the 11th edition of our Twin Cities Film Festival. Within that, we sought to be a platform for Arab/Arab American/Muslim filmmakers of both emerging and established status to share their work, authentically representing real Arab experiences and countering current stereotypical and harmful representations of our communities circulating through popular media and politics. Through this, we also sought to give Minnesotan audiences a complex, real encounter with the Arab world and Arab diaspora through film. We sought to increase and diversify that audience, and therefore in-crease our revenue with an eye toward sustainability of this program. We did indeed achieve our goals—the 2016 Twin Cities Arab Film Festival was successfully presented by Mizna at Saint Anthony Main Theater September 29 through October 2. We showed 14 feature length films and 16 shorts, including a set of local Iraqi emerging filmmakers’ shorts in conjunction with the Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project and, for the first time, a special free high school screening with partner schools/teachers. We also had an opening party at Pracna. The 2016 Twin Cities Arab Film Festival box office numbers grew by 25%. The special free high school screening brought in a new population of youth to our festival for a film about the contemporary music scene in four Arab countries, with a post-show discussion with local Arab and Muslim artists. Regarding what did not work, we had a large group of high school students who were coming for a school-day matinee cancel at the last minute because of a mix-up with their transportation that their teachers did not anticipate. Although did have a theater half-full of high school students, we had expected to be completely full. What we will do differently is to di-versify the locations that students are coming from, and to sign an agreement with schools or teachers so that there is a commitment to follow through with bringing students for this special opportunity, understanding that there may be unforeseen circumstances. The community identified in this proposal is the Twin Cities Arab and Muslim community. This community is critical for Mizna; we strive to serve it and to be an outlet for the vital voices it represents. We did successfully reach the intended community, in that the numbers in our survey results point to 40% of our audience identifying as Arab or Muslim. While we did reach the audience we intended, generally, we have noticed that we don’t often have first generation immigrants attending our film festival, and that was the case this year. There may be a continued perception among relatively new immigrants, or for community members who are relatively new to the US that our film festival is too racy or esoteric. We are committed to reaching out at community events like Palestine Day, Egyptian American Society of Minnesota’s annual picnic, and the Maronite Church’s Lebanese Festival to spread the word about the festival. We also are working to seek children’s films or current cartoons that are popular in the Middle East to be screened at our festival for Family Screenings. We met our accessibility goals in that our ticket prices did not increase, we continued to offer student and senior ticket prices. We advertised the accommodations of large-print materials and translation more than two weeks before the festival. We also offered for the first time a free student screening. The venue was ADA compliant as planned.