Mimesis Documentary Festival x Nederland
This grant funded a free to the public screening of the ecological film There Will Be Some Who Will Not Fear Even That Void with filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky at the Backdoor Theatre in Nederland, who attended the screening in person to introduce his work and host a post-film discussion. Saeed was a featured artist at the 2023 Mimesis Documentary Festival in Boulder.
There Will Be Some Who Will Not Fear Even That Void is an ecological film for the 21st century: part expedition documentary, part personal exploration of man’s relationship with nature. The film is a semi-fictional, sci-fi documentary, made as Director Saeed Taji Farouky’s love-letter to the Arctic. Shot over two and a half weeks on a tall ship as it sailed around Norway’s Arctic Svalbard Archipelago, …Even That Void examines the environment’s influence on us – emotionally, psychologically and ethically. The film suggests that the limits to exploring and dominating nature are no longer technological, but moral. We now have the technology to ‘conquer’ virtually any part of the planet if we want to – the question is no longer ‘can we’ but ‘should we’?
Artist Biography
Saeed Taji Farouky is a Palestinian-Egyptian-British filmmaker who has been making work around themes of conflict, human rights, and colonialism since 2004. His 2021 documentary, A Thousand Fires premiered as the opening film of Locarno’s Critics’ Week where it won the Marco Zucchi Prize for most innovative documentary. His previous documentary Tell Spring Not to Come This Year (2015) won the Amnesty International Award and the Audience Choice Panorama Award at Berlinale 2015. In 2011, he was named a Senior TED Fellow, and he was previously named Artist-In-Residence at the British Museum and Tate Britain. Farouky has been a regular human rights speaker and educator with Amnesty International for 10 years. He has been teaching filmmaking and cinematography since 2009 at venues including University College London, National Film and Television School (UK), Scottish Documentary Institute (UK), Sensory Ethnography Lab (Harvard University, USA) and Maysles Documentary Centre (USA). He is the designer and lead tutor of a radical, free film school that supports people from backgrounds underrepresented in the industry, and co-founder of Safar, the UK’s only film festival dedicated entirely to Arab cinema.
About the Mimesis Documentary Festival
Artist-focused, community-oriented, and committed to showcasing the infinite potential of nonfiction media, the fourth annual Mimesis Documentary Festival, August 15-20, 2023, in Boulder, Colorado, is an immersive theatrical and virtual slate of movies, workshops, and more with artists, producers, and scholars from around the world. Presented in conjunction with Boulder’s Dairy Arts Center and the B2 Center for Media, Arts, and Performance, the festival brings together six days of screenings, installation-based documentary art pieces, workshops, and conversations with some of the most dynamic voices in documentary media exploring contemporary culture.