LONDON: This year’s SAFAR Film Festival will be held from June 18-30 in nine British cities, making it the largest and longest-running Arab cinema event in the UK, according to the Arab British Center.

Curated by long-time SAFAR and Arab British Center collaborator Rabih El-Khoury, the 2024 program will explore the themes of dreams, hopes, and realities through stories from 15 Arab countries.

The festival’s program features 60 screenings and events across four London venues, as well as cinemas in Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Oxford and Plymouth.

El-Khoury said the festival will include Sudanese and Palestinian cinema, and promised audiences “themes spanning family dynamics, loss, love, migration, and the harsh truths of war and politics.”

He said: “Within these stories, and through challenging and captivating cinema, we aim to facilitate exchange, reflection and share strength in solidarity.”

In its ninth year, SAFAR is viewed as the leading platform for showcasing Arab cinema in the UK.

The program features new releases, classics, archive film, and family-friendly screenings.

Highlights include the documentary “Life is Beautiful” by Mohamed Jalaby, which examines European solidarity, and the rigidity of borders, both physical and bureaucratic, amid the Gaza war in 2014.

Other works include “Bye Bye Tiberias” by Lina Soualem, a poignant exploration of four generations of Palestinian women; “The Burdened” by Yemeni director Amr Gamal, which follows Isra’a and Ahmed who struggle to provide a sense of normalcy for their three young children; and “Inshallah a Boy” by Amjad Al Rasheed.

“The festival forms a key part of our work to further understanding of the Arab world in the UK,” said Nadia El-Sebai, executive director of the Arab British Center.

“This year we are honored to work once more with Rabih El-Khoury and our guest curators and partners across the UK to present our biggest festival to date.

“Despite the shadows cast by the difficult realities faced across the region, SAFAR invites us to come together and find solace, hopes and dreams, in the universal language of cinema,” she said.

BOSTON: A Gulf Creatives Conference will begin on May 10 at Harvard University, bringing together more than 170 speakers and over 1,000 delegates from sectors such as arts and culture, business and innovation, nonprofits and public policy, healthcare, and science and technology.

The three-day event is organized by The Diwan, a student-run organization at the university in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Abdulla Almarzooqi, chairperson of the organization’s UAE Committee, and a graduate student at Harvard, told Arab News the aim is for the conference to “become the premier gathering for creative minds from the Gulf in the US,” and to “empower, inspire and support Gulf creatives to drive positive change.”

The Diwan was founded in the fall of 2023 as a platform for experts, academics, policymakers and students to discuss topics relevant to the Arab world, and particularly the Gulf region, including entrepreneurship, the empowerment of women and young people, and education, he added.

It organized a conference in November last year titled “Shaping the Arab World: Navigating Opportunities and Challenges” that addressed the geopolitics of the region and the ongoing war in Gaza. Almarzooqi said it was the largest gathering of Arab ambassadors in the history of Harvard University.

Now the organization is hosting the Gulf Creatives Conference, at a time when emotions are running high on many college campuses in the US amid protests against the conflict in Gaza by students and, in some cases, faculty members. However, the Harvard event will focus on “creativity and showcasing the region’s most promising talents,” said Almarzooqi.

“Amid the rising tensions on US college campuses, we believe firmly in the power of creativity and the arts in healing wounds and bridging divides,” he added.

The conference will include 24 discussion sessions and five workshops, covering topics such as public policy, innovation strategies, and the future of healthcare, in which all delegates are encouraged to actively participate, organizers said.

The speakers include prominent figures such as: Dr. Mahmoud Al-Yamany, sector head of health and well-being at the NEOM urban development megaproject in Saudi Arabia; Majid Ibrahim Al-Fayyadh, CEO of the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center in Riyadh; and Deemah Al-Yahya, secretary-general of the Digital Cooperation Organization.

The Gulf Creatives Conference will take place from May 10 to 12 at Harvard University.