Hisham Bizri Films:
City Of Brass
Vertices
Song For the Deaf Ear
By : Hisham Bizri
Screens: Sunday, March 14th, 2:30pm
Director will be present for a post-screening discussion with audience.
Director’s Bio:
Hisham is a Lebanese-American filmmaker. He has worked in the US and Hungary with filmmakers Raoul Ruiz and Miklós Jancsó and has made short films in the US, Lebanon, Ireland, Korea, and France. Much of his films may be viewed as meditations on the themes of exile and melancholy. These visual meditations are shaped by his personal experience as someone who lives between the Middle East of his Lebanese homeland and the Anglo/European culture and art. Emerging from this personal context, his films create a dialectic between the retinal/material impact of the image and its conceptual possibility in order to depict the world he lives in. In this way, his films may be viewed as the material expression of intuition and emotions, but also as a way to understand how we construct ourselves as people.
His work has been shown in the Arab world and internationally, including the Villa Medici (Rome), The American Academy in Rome, Beaux-Arts de Paris, Ayam Beirut Al Cinema'iya festival (Cinema Days of Beirut), Roma Contemporary Art Fair, Louvre Museum (Paris), Biennale Des Cinema Arabes (Paris), Milan Film Festival, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris), Harvard Film Archives (Cambridge), Reina Sofia (Madrid), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Cinémathèque Française (Paris), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Cairo Opera House, among others.
Hisham has served as a jury on a number of international film festivals including the Chicago International Film Festival. He has been instrumental in establishing filmmaking at the Lebanese American University (Lebanon, 1995), the Korean National University (Korea, 1999), and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT (2000-2003). He is also the co-founder of the Arab Institute of Film (AIF Amman, 2005).
Hisham is the recipient of grants from New York, Massachusetts, and San Francisco Arts Councils as well as the LEF, McKnight, Jerome, Rockefeller foundations, among others. He won the John Simon Guggenheim fellowship award in 2007, and in 2008 he won the McKnight Filmmaking Fellowship from the Independent Feature Project (IFP) as well as the American Academy Rome Prize and was named the John Armstrong Chaloner/Jacob H. Lazarus Metropolitan Museum of Art fellow by the Academy. He is currently an Associate Professor of film at the University of Minnesota.