Screenprints: A Maamoul Press Film Series
SHATHAYA SHORT FILMS
Sept. 2, 2026
This film screening + fundraiser presented the U.S. premiere of new short films from Lebanon, created by participants from the Lebanon-based Shathaya Moving Image Workshop. These films, by four young women from South Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut, all directly affected by war, emerge from the starting point of fragments—personal objects, photographs, archival material—to explore image, memory, the political thresholds of looking, and counter-narratives of resistance.
Shathaya (Arabic for Fragments) is a collective participatory project by Studio Morabaa that creates a space for image-makers and filmmakers to develop visual projects through critical discussion, experimentation, mentorship, and the building of a collaborative artistic community.
Held at Talking Dolls in Detroit, all ticket and concession sales supported ongoing mutual aid efforts in Lebanon, alongside a Maamoul Press pop-up shop in support of artist and mutual aid efforts in both Lebanon and Gaza.
Films are in Arabic with English subtitles.
My Mother Who Never Grows Old (2026) dir. Zainab Saed (8:18 mins)
Guided by a voice recording of her mother, Zainab pieces together the story of a young woman standing at the threshold of death. In doing so, she uncovers the traces left behind in the faces preserved by old photographs. The journey becomes an act of restoring fractured memory while questioning the meaning of homeland and what survives when everything else has been lost.
Guided by a voice recording of her mother, Zainab pieces together the story of a young woman standing at the threshold of death. In doing so, she uncovers the traces left behind in the faces preserved by old photographs. The journey becomes an act of restoring fractured memory while questioning the meaning of homeland and what survives when everything else has been lost.
Upon Returning Home (2026) dir. Fatima Alaadin (9:44 mins)
With a ceasefire announced, Fatima hits the road to her southern Lebanese hometown, Majdal Selm. In her now-rubbled grandfather's house, she excavates for an anchor, for meaning. A year after finding and quietly safeguarding a treasured possession of a martyr, Fatima decides to hand it over to his parents. However, she is faced with a dilemma: What defines right from wrong in times of crisis? Can silence be well-intended? Or is it always a source of harm?
With a ceasefire announced, Fatima hits the road to her southern Lebanese hometown, Majdal Selm. In her now-rubbled grandfather's house, she excavates for an anchor, for meaning. A year after finding and quietly safeguarding a treasured possession of a martyr, Fatima decides to hand it over to his parents. However, she is faced with a dilemma: What defines right from wrong in times of crisis? Can silence be well-intended? Or is it always a source of harm?
One Verse For All (2026) dir. Rayan Bassam (10 mins)
Rayan meets Abbas, Abdullah, and Ali at the Martyrs' Cemetery in Aainata, where together they begin searching through what remains of the cemetery after it was destroyed by the Israeli military during the 2024 war. As they explore, her friends share their stories about the place, their connection to it, and the people buried there before its destruction—and how that relationship has endured to this day.
Rayan meets Abbas, Abdullah, and Ali at the Martyrs' Cemetery in Aainata, where together they begin searching through what remains of the cemetery after it was destroyed by the Israeli military during the 2024 war. As they explore, her friends share their stories about the place, their connection to it, and the people buried there before its destruction—and how that relationship has endured to this day.
My First Homeland (2026) dir. Zahraa Watfa (8 mins)
At the eastern wall of a house scattered by the war, Zahraa returns to confront the absence of her uncle.
At the eastern wall of a house scattered by the war, Zahraa returns to confront the absence of her uncle.
Women Artists of the Arab DiasporA Exhibition
2026
Women Artists of the Arab Diaspora, an exhibition organized by The Amplification Project and held at the Detroit Historical Museum, featured a showcase of works by Maamoul Press artists with book and print work produced by Maamoul over the years.
This exhibition emerges from The Amplification Project, a living, crowd-sourced digital archive documenting art shaped by forced migration, displacement, and cultural survival. Focusing on contemporary Arab women artists connected to Detroit, it explores migration, inheritance, and life between cultural geographies.
Detroit Historical Museum
June 3 - Sept. 13, 2026
Screenprints: A Maamoul Press Film Series
Memory of the South: Short films from South Lebanon
April 10, 2026
Held at/in partnership with the Arab American National Museum, this fundraiser and screening featured two short films from South Lebanon: From My Mother’s Novel (2025) dir. Fatima Joumaa and Buffer Zone (2025) dir. Farrah Berrou; followed by a conversation with the filmmakers in the midst of the escalation of war on Lebanon.
Filmmakers Fatima Joumaa and Farrah Berrou document scenes from South Lebanon during and after the 2023-2024 war of the support front for Gaza in Lebanon following October 7. Through these films, a filmmaker talkback, Q&A, and fundraising pop-up shop, we come together in grief and solidarity to center and contextualize narratives from South Lebanon, learn, and support relief efforts for displaced families in the face of renewed Israeli aggression.
Buffer Zone (2025) dir. Farrah Berrou
18 minutes | English and Arabic with bilingual subtitles
Part documentary, part memoir, Farrah Berrou takes us to her ancestral border village of Kfarkila in South Lebanon in the wake of its near total destruction. Footage from her first (and last) return after the “ceasefire” mixes with archival images, parsing the significance of home, memory, and the many forms of theft that Farrah and her family have had to stomach after years beside the genocidal aggressor that is Israel.
18 minutes | English and Arabic with bilingual subtitles
Part documentary, part memoir, Farrah Berrou takes us to her ancestral border village of Kfarkila in South Lebanon in the wake of its near total destruction. Footage from her first (and last) return after the “ceasefire” mixes with archival images, parsing the significance of home, memory, and the many forms of theft that Farrah and her family have had to stomach after years beside the genocidal aggressor that is Israel.
From My Mother’s Novel (2025) dir. Fatima Joumaa
9 minutes | Arabic with English subtitles
Fatima, Layla’s daughter, after capturing moments in South Lebanon, returns to her home to hide within the folds of her mother’s book.
9 minutes | Arabic with English subtitles
Fatima, Layla’s daughter, after capturing moments in South Lebanon, returns to her home to hide within the folds of her mother’s book.
Pop-Up SERIES
This recurring, free, drop-in style event in Detroit features a Maamoul Press pop-up shop, art-making activities, and the launch of new publications.
2026 POP-UP | Feb. 7, 2026
This edition focused on raising funds supporting Gazan and Sudanese artists and mutual aid efforts, and featured the book launch of to document annihilation or to resist it, a zine collecting analog photography and text by filmmaker and photographer from South Lebanon, Fatima Joumaa. Pop-up activities included petal-fold zine-making, live screen printing, and Arabic letterpress printing.
2024 POP-UP FOR PALESTINE | Aug. 3, 2024
This edition focused on raising funds in support of Gaza mutual aid efforts, and featured the book launch of A Normal Conversation In A Normal Household, a sketch diary zine by Palestinian artist Amal El-Nakhala collecting short comics and illustrations reflecting on her experience of the war on Gaza. Pop-up activities included a workshop where participants created one or more pages responding to the prompt: “Why do you stand in solidarity with Gaza?” (responses were later compiled into the Detroit to Gaza zine), and Arabic letterpress printing.
Rawand Issa & Malaka Gharib: Graphic Memoir & Navigating Change
Aug. 13, 2023
Maamoul Press and the Ann Arbor District Library (AADL) present a livestreamed conversation between graphic novelists Malaka Gharib and Rawand Issa, centering on their recently published graphic memoirs: Gharib’s It Won’t Always Be Like This (Ten Speed Graphic, 2022) and Issa’s Inside the Giant Fish (Maamoul Press, 2022). Both authors delve into nostalgic summers on the beach and themes of identity, adolescence, and growing up amid environmental change and social expectations explored in these works.
WATCH ON YOUTUBE
Rawand Issa is a comics artist and writer from Lebanon whose work focuses on socio-economic issues and documenting real stories. She is the author of the graphic memoir “Inside the Giant Fish”, the story of a girl looking for her lost memories on a beach that no longer exists, published in Arabic in 2019 and English in 2022. She has created several other short comic books and zines including “The Insubordinate” and “Not From Mars” in addition to contributing political cartoons and comics to various publications.
Malaka Gharib is a journalist, cartoonist and graphic novelist. She is the author of "I Was Their American Dream," a graphic memoir published in 2019 about being first-generation Filipino Egyptian American, which won an Arab American Book Award in 2020. Then in 2022, she published "It Won't Always Be Like This," a graphic memoir about her summers in the Middle East. By day, she works as a digital editor at NPR for Life Kit. Her comics and writing have been published in the Los Angeles Times, Catapult, The Believer Magazine and The New Yorker. She lives in Nashville, Tenn., with her husband, son and Shiba Inu.
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