Ahla friends,
Quick behind the scenes moment. I use a platform to send you this newsletter every week, and to keep a newsletter viable, creators usually have to count on advertising money. You've probably seen this in other newsletters: a random ad drops in the middle of your read, you click, they get paid. I get those offers very often. Mostly AI tools and other random things I don't even open. Hard pass, always, don't worry.
But for the past few months, the offer that keeps showing up is Kalshi. A prediction market platform and, technically, a SWANA business. There's a short documentary about Kalshi and Polymarket on Netflix right now, just 36 minutes (wished it was longer and deeper). If you’re curious. Putting aside all the issues with prediction market platforms, and this is by no means an endorsement of any of them, I do need to report that our Lebanese guy outshines Shayne :)
The irony of this note, of course, is that I just gave Kalshi what they wanted. For free.
Let’s get to it
Samar
THE SHORTLIST
The Ones Worth Your Time
COMEDY
Arabic Improv Show with Special Guest Ahmed Radwan
Fri Jul 31, 7:30-9:30pm
Balance Arts Center, Flatiron
Egyptian actor, founder of Improv4all in Cairo and Maktoob3alina, Ahmed Radwan joins Jokermail Productions for a fully interactive Arabic comedy improv show. The audience participates in this immersive experience as Arab performers create spontaneous skits.
Promocode: MENNAJULY26 (20% off)
WORKSHOP
Weaving Camera and Pen: Storytelling within Photography
Sat Aug 1, 10am-4pm
Landline Studios NYC, Staten Island
A workshop exploring how writing and photography weave together to create more compelling stories. For photographers who want more depth in their narrative and writers who think visually.
ART
The Art of Illumination with Behnaz Karjoo
Sun Aug 2, 10am-5pm
The Old American Can Factory, Gowanus
Iranian-born, NY-based artist Behnaz Karjoo leads a full-day workshop in Islamic illumination, the meditative art of tazhib. Geometric patterns, gilding, color, and a practice that genuinely asks you to slow all the way down.
THE FREE ONE
Free and Delightful
COMMUNITY
makan turns 2
Sat Aug 1, 6-10pm
Common Things, East Village
Makan is an independent publishing platform bringing artists, books, and conversations from the Global South to readers worldwide. They're turning two, which in independent publishing years is basically a miracle. A celebration of exactly the kind of platform we need more of
EVENT HIGHLIGHT
Sponsored Event
Danielle Arbid Is Getting Her Flowers & She Deserves Every Single One
July 29th-Aug 2nd, In Person and Online
The Arab Film Institute's Arab Women in the Arts is back for its 6th edition, five days of films, a mixer, and a proper retrospective honoring Lebanese-French filmmaker Danielle Arbid. July 29th through August 2nd, in person across NYC and online for the rest of the country. No excuse not to engage with this one.
Arbid has been making films for nearly three decades, fiction, documentary, video art, film essays, and doing it with a fearlessness that has gotten her celebrated at Cannes, Locarno, Toronto, San Sebastián, and the Venice Biennale, and censored in equal measure. War, memory, sexuality, class, forbidden desire, she goes there. Every time. Her most recent feature Only Rebels Win opened the Panorama section at the 2026 Berlinale. The woman does not slow down.
Here's what's screening:
🎬 OPENING NIGHT — In the Battlefields (2004)
Wed Jul 29 | Anthology Film Archives, Manhattan
Beirut, 1983. Twelve-year-old Lina and her aunt's maid Siham navigate a wartime existence together, secret love affairs, class tension, longing, and a friendship that becomes everything. This is where Arbid announced herself. Twenty-two years later it still holds.
Tickets
🎬 Parisienne (2015)
Thurs 30th, Nitehawk Cinema, Williamsburg
18-year-old Lina arrives in Paris looking for what she never found in Lebanon: freedom. She navigates the city through romantic encounters, survival instinct as her only luggage. Selected at Toronto International Film Festival. Feels like it was made yesterday.
Tickets
🎬 Four Shorts by Danielle Arbid
Friday July 31st, Programmed by Nanor Vosgueritchian | Various venues
Four intimate portraits of her own family. Her father disappearing into illness. Her mother in a car, calling banks and lawyers, running out of verbal fuel (almost). Her brother, five years younger, who stayed in Lebanon when she left at seventeen, bound together by shared memories of violence they were always ashamed to recall. And a self-portrait, a photo meant for a lover, never sent, sitting with the question of where memory ends and invention begins. Lebanon is in every frame. The tenderness, the fear, the pain, the madness.
Tickets
Films: Nous / Nihna (2005), Allo Cherie (2015), Souvenirs de Violence (2020), I Give My Heart a Medal for Letting Go of You (2021)
🎬 A Lost Man (2009)
Sat Aug 1st, Low Cinema / Woodbine
A French photographer travels the globe chasing extreme experiences, falls under the spell of an enigmatic old man named Fouad Saleh, and heads to the Far East looking for answers. Selected at Cannes Directors' Fortnight.
Tickets
🥂 FILMMAKERS & CREATORS MIXER
Friday Jul 31 | Location TBC
If you work in film, media, or the arts, this one's for you. AFMI hosts a mixer specifically for filmmakers and creatives to connect, network, and find their people.
RSVP
🌐 ONLINE PROGRAM
Can't make it in person? Selected films are available online to US audiences through August 2nd. No reason to miss Arbid's work entirely.
Tickets
Five days. Multiple venues. One filmmaker who has spent thirty years refusing to make comfortable work.
COMMUNITY DISPATCH
People, projects, and news from across the community
Maryam Turkey Is Dropping Her New Album at Public Records On 08/14
Meet Maryam Turkey. Iraqi-American, based in New York, award-winning visual artist, and now officially musician. She works in clay, sound, sculpture, performance, and apparently does all of it at a level that earns you a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Design. Cool girl doesn't even cover it.
Born in Baghdad, she came to the US as a refugee at fifteen. She's since built a visual art practice recognized internationally, public sculptures around the world, immersive installations, the kind of work that makes you stop mid-stride. Music was always in the background, but Hiragt El Rouh, her debut album dropping August 14th, is where it finally comes forward.
The album reimagines traditional Iraqi folk songs, sung in Arabic, produced with Benjamin Lazar Davis and a stellar lineup of collaborators including Shahzad Ismaily and Kenny Wollesen. The source material is older, more conservative: forbidden love, family disapproval, longing with nowhere to go. Maryam doesn't update them or make them easier to swallow. She inhabits them, transforms that intensity into something timeless and deeply personal. The title track opens with: "I burned my soul when I lost them / I cried and with my tears I drowned them." Yeah. That kind of album.
To celebrate the release, she's performing at Public Records in Gowanus on August 14th with Umer Piracha, Arjun Shah, and Disco Tehran.
Go stream the single. Then go to the show.
Maryam Turkey: Hiragt El Rouh Single Release
Thu Aug 14 | Public Records, Gowanus
With Umer Piracha, Arjun Shah, Disco Tehran
Tickets here
Boussa
Samar
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