Join Firelight Media for a Beyond Resilience roundtable discussion with Muslim filmmakers. Following the premiere of the documentary Jihad Rehab at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, these filmmakers and their allies have called for a broad re-examination of what constitutes ethics and accountability in the documentary ecosystem for funders, programmers, distributors, and filmmakers. The panel will include discussion of these filmmakers’ own representational storytelling practices.
**Accessibility notice: This event will include ASL interpretation.**
Marcia Smith is president and co-founder of Firelight Media, which produces documentary films, provides artistic and financial support to emerging filmmakers of color, and builds impact campaigns to connect documentaries to audiences and social justice advocates. Under her leadership, Firelight Media was honored with a MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.
Karim Ahmad is a writer, culture strategist, member of the Guild of Future Architects, and the main author of the recently published Restoring the Future report, a manifestation of a world-building and industry organizing initiative co-created by a coalition of arts organizations. He was previously the Director of Outreach & Inclusion at the Sundance Institute, and a Senior Strategist and Senior Producer at ITVS. He is the Creator and Showrunner of the groundbreaking science fiction series FUTURESTATES and the writer of the upcoming speculative fiction comic book DIVIDE. He can be found on Twitter as @thatkarimahmad.
Assia Boundaoui is an Algerian-American filmmaker, writer and investigative journalist. Her debut short film about *hijabi* hair salons for the HBO Documentary Films the "LENNY" series premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Her award-winning feature-length directorial debut THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED, a documentary investigating a decade of FBI surveillance in Assia's Muslim-American community, had its world premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, won the jury prize for Best Documentary at the Woodstock Film Festival and was nationally broadcast on PBS "POV" in 2019. Assia was named one of Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film" and her work has been the recipient of support from the Ford Foundation JustFilms, International Documentary Association, San Francisco Film Society, Impact Partners and Firelight Media and FRONTLINE among others. Assia was a 2019 New America National Fellow and in 2020 was honored to be the recipient of the Livingston Award for national reporting. She is currently a Ford Foundation JustFilms fellow hosted at the MIT Open Documentary Lab Co-Creation Studio where she is iterating a co-created, AI fueled sequel to her film: the Inverse Surveillance Project. She has an M.A. in journalism from New York University and is an Algiers born, Arabic speaking Chicagoan currently based in Chicago, IL.
Sami Khan is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker whose work in fiction and documentary has been supported by the Sundance and Tribeca Film Institutes, Rooftop Films, the Gotham, the NBC/Universal’s Directors Fellowship, MPAC, and the Islamic Scholarship Fund. His films have screened at leading festivals including Tribeca, Toronto, Hot Docs, and Mumbai. Sami's upcoming doc ANGEL DOSE tells the story of an inspiring Muslim-American nurse based in Philadelphia.
Marjan Safinia is an Iranian documentary filmmaker whose films examine identity, community, and social justice. With Grace Lee, Marjan produced and directed And She Could Be Next. Other works include: Seeds and But You Speak Such Good English. She is a founding member of Beyond Inclusion. Until 2018, Marjan was the longest-serving President of the Board of Directors of the International Documentary Association, and the first woman of color to lead since its founding in 1982. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Chicken & Egg Pictures, is a member of the Academy, and one of four co-hosts of The D-Word.
