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Moderator:
Rolla Tahir, Filmmaker, TAF Co-founder & Artistic Director
Rolla Tahir is a filmmaker and director of photography based in Toronto. She’s lensed short, narrative and experimental films, which screened across Canada and internationally, including the UK, Germany, and the United States. Obsessed with the durability, longevity and spontaneity of the analog film medium, Rolla has worked with Super 8, 16mm and 35mm to explore the analog process and its possibilities.
Speakers:
Desirée Custers, Arabic literature translator and Researcher
Desirée Custers is a writer, researcher, and translator of Arabic literature. Her translations from Arabic to Dutch have appeared in poetry magazines and cultural platforms in Belgium, and in 2019 she translated the novel Brusselse Vrouwen (‘Women of Brussels’) by the Palestinian author Nisma Alaklouk. For her masters’ degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies, Desiree submitted a thesis on Arabic science fiction with the title Arabic science fiction as vehicle for criticism, in which she focused on the novel Harb al-Kalb al-Thaniyyah (‘Dog War II’, 2018) by Palestinian/Jordanian author Ibrahim Nasrallah. The thesis was short-listed for the Flemish thesis prize in 2019. Desiree writes about Arab sci-fi and literary and cultural topics on her bi-lingual Arabic/English blog, issabramil.com. She also holds an M.A. in Conflict Studies and Human Rights from Utrecht University, the Netherlands.
Nehal El-Hadi, Writer, Researcher, Editor
Nehal El-Hadi investigates the relationships between the body (racialised, gendered), place (urban, virtual), and technology (internet, health).
She completed a Ph.D. in Planning at the University of Toronto, where her research examined the relationships between user-generated content and everyday public urban life.
As a scholar, her hybrid digital/material research methods are informed by her training and experience as a science and environmental journalist.
Nehal advocates for the responsible, accountable, and ethical treatment of user-generated content in the fields of journalism, planning, and healthcare.
Her writing has appeared in academic journals, general scholarship publications, literary magazines, and several anthologies and edited collections.
Nehal is the Science+Technology Editor at The Conversation Canada, an academic news site, and Editor-in-Chief of Studio Magazine, a biannual print publication dedicated to contemporary Canadian craft and design. She currently holds a residency at Toronto’s Theatre Centre, where she is developing a live arts event that explores surveillance, privacy, and consent.
Nehal sits on the Board of Directors of FiXT POINT Arts & Media and Provocation Ideas Festival. She is a member of the Digital Communities Advisory Panel at the Centre for Free Expression. She was previously a Visiting Scholar at the City Institute at York University.
Ayham Jabr, Filmmaker, Editor, Graphic Designer
Ayham Jabr is a Surreal Collage Artist, a Video Editor, a Videographer and a Graphic Designer. He studied Electronics at Damascus University, and lives in Damascus, Syria. His love for science fiction films, stories, and theories are a main source of inspiration behind his primarily digital art works.