Ayny (dir. Ahmad Saleh, 11 mins)
A cruel war has taken two brothers’ home. Their mother protects them under her arms and fosters the seed of their new life. Anxious her sons could come in danger if they leave the house. But the boys chase their dream to play a music instrument they’ve fallen in love with. A beautiful Oud. They collect scrap metal to earn the money and must find out that their mother’s fear was for a good reason. But as strong birds will always fly, the two boys become one to overcome their trauma.

A Magical Substance Flows Into Me (dir. Jumana Manna, 70 mins)
Over the course of the film, Jumana Manna visits Kurdish, Moroccan and Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, members of urban and rural Palestinian communities, Bedouins and Coptic Christians, as they exist today within the geographic space of historical Palestine. She engages them in conversation around their music, while lingering over that music’s history as well as its current, sometimes endangered state. She asks these individuals to perform, and they do. Intercutting these motley encounters with musicians, are a series of vignettes of Manna interacting with her own parents in the bounds of their family home.

This film will be introduced by Hazem Jamjoum a historian-in-training, working on a doctoral dissertation on the history of music production in the Arab world at New York University.