Join the UC Riverside community for a special screening of the award-winning documentary TRIPOLI / A TALE OF THREE CITIES, followed by an intimate conversation and Q&A with director Raed El Rafei.

Event Schedule:

• 10:30 a.m.: Film Screening (88 mins)

• 12:00 p.m.: Moderated Conversation with Raed El Rafei and UCR Professors Christophe Katrib (Theatre, Film, and Digital Production) and Courtney R. Baker (Department of English) followed by a Q&A with the audience.

About the Film:

While living abroad, a filmmaker returns to his hometown of Tripoli, Lebanon, to confront a landscape that once rejected him as a queer child. Armed with a microphone and a patient lens, El Rafei traverses coffee shops, public squares, and hidden corners to ask inhabitants about their social beliefs and the embrace of new ideas. Through intimate conversations with marginalized individuals—including a communist activist and a queer music producer—this contemplative "urban symphony" paints a vivid portrait of a city caught between a deep economic crisis and the hopeful sparks of revolution.

About the Filmmaker:

Raed El Rafei is an independent filmmaker, film scholar, and multimedia journalist. For over fifteen years, he worked as a Middle East reporter for national and international publications and as a researcher, producer, and director of TV news reports and documentaries for channels like Al-Jazeera, CNN, and ARTE. Since 2011, he has been making independent hybrid films that screened at international film festivals and received several awards. His feature films include: 74 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle) (2012) and Here I am ... Here you are (2016).

He is currently an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He holds a Ph.D. in Film and Digital Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Tripoli / A Tale of Three Cities, his new feature documentary, will have its world premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival, Amsterdam (IDFA), the world’s largest documentary film festival, in November 2024.

Special Student Workshop:

From 3 - 5 p.m., Raed El Rafei will lead a two-hour workshop specifically for UCR students. The workshop will feature excerpts from his films, including an in-depth exploration of social justice movements in the 1970s and their lasting influence on contemporary politics in the region. Rafei will also discuss his more recent work, which focuses on queer subjectivities and identities from a non-Western perspective. In particular, he will examine his latest documentary, a poetic exploration of queerness in his hometown of Tripoli, through which he seeks to develop a new, non-Western-centric cinematic language for representing queerness. Drawing on his extensive professional experience, Rafei will engage students in discussions about the creative documentary process at every stage of production, highlighting both the challenges and the opportunities filmmakers encounter.

• Students must register to attend. REGISTER HERE.

Sponsors:

Hosted by the Department of Theatre, Film, and Digital Production.

Co-Sponsors:

This event is made possible through the generous support of:

• Middle Eastern Student Center (MESC)

• LGBT Resource Center

• Department of English

• Media and Cultural Studies (MCS)

• Middle East and Islamic Studies (MEIS)

• UCR ARTS

• Center for Ideas and Society (CIS)

• Political Science

• Comparative Literature & Languages