Screening and talk by Saeed Taji Farouky in the Backdoor Theatre

There Will Be Some Who Will Not Fear Even That Void (2013, Norway, 54’)

Please join us for a special presentation of 2023 Featured Mimesis Artist Saeed Taji Farouky’s 2013 climate documentary on Sunday, August 13 at 3 PM in the Backdoor Theatre at the Nederland Community Center with the artist in-person.

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.

Saeed at Mimesis 2023

A Thousand Fires (2021, FR/CH/NL/PS, 90’)
Saturday, August 19 at 7:30 PM

n the Magway region of Myanmar, a country home to one of the oldest petroleum industries in the world, live husband and wife Thein Shwe and Htwe Tin. Running an unregulated oil field, they produce a barrel every few days. They wish above all else to see their youngest son succeed, to break the cycle of poverty. A kettle boils. Mud slicked hands work sputtering machines. The ambient sound of a football match hums from a nearby television. “These days passed quickly”, Htwe says.

A Thousand Fires is a portrait of a family in flux, and a story of intergenerational conflict and compromise. It is a film of transient moments; of hopes and aspirations; of faith in the forces of karma and luck; of a place, a community, and the rhythms of a day to day; of lingering memories and a turbulent past; and of life persisting, regardless.

Soon We Will All Be History Here – Sunday, August 20, 10 AM
A performance lecture at the Caribou Townsite

Soon We Will All Be History Here is a spatial performance lecture that examines absence as a fundamental part of radical cinema. Incorporating elements of music, architecture, and literature, Saeed will walk with participants around the remnants of the town of Caribou; a psychogeographic wandering through loss, displacement, reincarnation, and film as a form of resistance.

For more information, visit mimesisfestival.org.