A rare opportunity to watch and actively engage with some of the most exciting and innovative films to emerge from the region in the past four decades, especially those by female directors. – James Neil, curator

Women's Cinema from Tangiers to Tehran offers diverse representations by women filmmakers, documentarists and artists about a broad spectrum of concerns of various forms and contents. Through these different formats, the program highlights the often-invisible threads that exist between fiction, documentary, and how they all share and integrate specific concerns and discourses about contemporary reality in the Middle East and its diasporas. The selection criteria for this program seeks to recognize works that are deserving of being part of the international cinematic canon--films such as The Silences of the Palace, and La Nouba des Femmes du Mont-Chenoua. What makes many of these works outstanding is a particular 'female gaze'; a strong sense of empathy or engagement is brought by directors to their subjects, whilst  remaining at a critical juncture and not necessarily romanticizing the  'woman's voice' as so many curated programs have in the past.