women
This year has been anything but easy, but a host of stellar movie releases from the Middle East made 2022 a remarkable year for filmmaking across the region. We’re ending this year by looking back through these triumphs of cinema, so that you can start 2023 with a ready-made list of outstanding and poignant films to watch. Bear witness to the horrors of the Nakba with Farha, gain a sense of the struggles faced by artists and filmmakers working under Iranian censorship in Jafar Panahi’s No Bears, see life through the eyes of a Syrian family starting a new life in Belgium in My Paper Life, follow Yusra and Sara Mardini’s perilous journey to safety in The Swimmers, and feel true fear with Reem, a Palestinian woman whose life is plunged into disaster in Huda’s Salon.
Following in the footsteps of her mother, renowned tatreez artist Feryal Abbasi-Ghnaim, Wafa Ghnaim of Tatreez & Tea is on a mission to preserve and promote tatreez, proudly claiming this beautiful textile art form for Palestinians across the globe and encouraging new generations of embroiderers to practice this age-old art.
Scent is one of the most powerful aspects of personal adornment. It lingers in the air long after a person has left, it brings back memories of places we’ve been or people we’ve loved, and it has a proven influence on our state of mind: from soothing lavender to pick-me-up rosemary, the powers of fragrance have been known and used for millennia. The use of fragrance goes well beyond that of beautification.
This week, we’re celebrating ten incredible Yemeni women making waves in the worlds of journalism, food, activism, photography, art, music and even paleoanthropology. From a filmmaker documenting the realities of living through the war in Yemen to an explorer uncovering the secrets of human evolution on Socotra, you need these fearless women on your feed!
Here are some amazing good news stories from across the Middle East worth celebrating this year, not to mention some that gave us a giggle!
Qahwa is a series of conversations conducted live on Instagram with inspiring individuals (and especially women!) in the Pink Jinn community from all over the Middle East and North Africa, where we talk culture, identity, politics and everything in between.
In 2000, Amina Yabis got the idea to create a female-only cooperative in her hometown of Sefrou. The Cherry Buttons Cooperative – which creates beautiful crafts out of traditionally crafted djellaba buttons – has continued to pave the way for women in Sefrou, particularly for women otherwise pushed to the margins of society.
Have you ever noticed that most of the journalists covering the Middle East and North Africa are… well… not from the Middle East and North Africa? Lebanese journalist, editor, and author Zahra Hankir noticed this too, which ed her to edit Our Women On The Ground, a wonderful collection of nineteen essays written by women who cover their own homelands in the Middle East and North Africa.
Bedouin women’s poetry is a rich, if little-known tradition of verse that stretches from Pre-Islamic Arabia all the way to the present day. While known within the Gulf and preserved in local communities, it rarely receives large-scale attention, generally because the emotional lives of women are considered culturally sensitive.