Date: March 25 - April 1, 2013
In honor of DOX BOX’s Syria Global Day 2013, ArteEast, a New York-based international arts organization dedicated to supporting the MENA region art sector is collaborating with IDFA, DokLeipzig, CPH:DOX and DocAlliance to bring the festival to a global audience online for one week.
Recognized as the leading international documentary film festival in the Arabic-speaking world, DOX BOX has been held every March in Syria since 2008. As a statement against the regime and due to continued disruption of activities on the ground, for the second year in a row, the festival will not be held.
In its place, DOX BOX commemorates the canceled festival by holding Syria Global Day 2013 a program of Syrian documentary films that were screened simultaneously all over the world from March 15th to March 18th. In solidarity with their Syrian colleagues, over twenty institutions across the Middle East and Europe screened the special program in theaters and public squares in Cairo, Beirut, Amman, Alexandria, Casablanca, Ramallah, as well as in liberated Syrian towns. Screenings were also aired on television networks in collaboration with ARTE and Al-Arabiya.
ArteEast is pleased to support our Syrian colleagues by making this important program available to our international audiences online.
Syria Global Day 2013 is comprised of two segments. The first is a series of six short films created by a new generation of Syrian filmmakers and selected for their cinematic ambition and unique narratives voices. This affords a rare glimpse of Syrian life that focuses on inter-faith relationships, coming of age and the daily struggles of coping with a society under siege. Film synopses and links can be found here.
The festival’s second segment, A Citizen with a Movie Camera, features clips of footage shot on mobile phones and hand-held cameras, documenting everyday life through the eyes of the citizen filmmaker, which Dox Box programmers have compiled into six thematic screening sessions. To read more about the thematic compilations and watch the videos, click here.
