Hania Mroué
Hania Mroué is the Founder and Director of Metropolis Art Cinema, the first art-house cinema in Lebanon opened in 2006. Metropolis aims to defend regional and international auteur films by presenting local audiences with alternative cinema including recent independent titles, cult films, classics, creative documentaries, animation, cine-concerts and experimental videos. Metropolis was the first cinema in the region to release theatrically independent documentaries, and to organize cine clubs for kids, counting today more than 12,000 junior members.

Hania is also a founding member of the cinema association Beirut DC, created in 1998 to produce, promote and support independent Arab cinema. She was appointed from 2001 to 2010 as managing director of “Ayam Beirut al Cinema’iya” the bi-annual Arab Film Festival initiated by Beirut DC.

From 2006 to 2009 she managed Med-Screen, a Euromed Audiovisual II project for the promotion of Arab cinema. Med-screen organized more than 30 Arab film weeks all though Europe and MENA countries, and presented Arab films at the two most prestigious European markets: Berlin and Cannes.

In 2009 she started MC Distribution a company dedicated to distributing and selling Arab and International auteur films.

From 2010 to 2012, she was appointed as Chief Arab programmer at the Doha film Institute where she worked on programming titles for the Doha Tribeca Film festival’s Arab Competition and DFI’s year round initiatives.

Malek Khouri
Malek Khouri is Professor and Chair of the Department of the Arts in the American University in Cairo. Just before he joined the AUC in 2008 he was the Director of the Film Studies Program and Head of the Communication Division in the Faculty of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary, Canada. Khouri’s current scholarly work focuses on the study of new Arab cinema and popular culture. Other areas of research that he worked on include: issues of class representations in Canadian cinema, media communications and the challenges of political and social change, Marxism and film theory.

Khouri’s 2010 book The Arab National Project in Youssef Chahin’s Cinema (American University in Cairo Press) has been recently translated and republished in Arabic in 2013 by the National Center for Translations, the Ministry of Culture in Egypt. Other scholarly work include Filming Politics: Communism And The Portrayal Of The Working Class At The National Film Board Of Canada, 1939-46 (University Of Calgary Press, 2007), and Working on Screen: Representations of the Working Class in Canadian Cinema (co-edited with Darrell Varga, University of Toronto Press, 2006). His article publications appeared in various international academic journals including The Journal of Comparative Studies of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, CineAction, Arab Studies Quarterly, History of Intellectual Culture, and Nature, Society and Thought, University of Toronto Quarterly, among others. Khouri is currently working on a book project on non-normative sexuality representations in New Arab Cinemas, and another study on Orientalist discourse in the critique of Arab cinema.

Khouri was born in Beirut, Lebanon and moved with his family to Canada in the late 1970s after the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War where he lived and worked until 2008 when he moved to Cairo.

Viola Shafik
Viola Shafik, PhD, is a freelance Filmmaker, Film Curator and FilmScholar. Currently she holds the position of the Head of Studies of the Documentary Campus MENA program. She authored among othersArab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity, AUC-Press, Cairo, 1998 and Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class and Nation, AUC-Press, 2007. She taught Film Studies at the American University in Cairo, has worked as a consultant for international film festivals and training initiatives, most notably La Biennale di Venezia and the al-Rawi Screenwriters Lab .

Also, she is a member of the selection committee of the World Cinema Fund (Berlinale). Viola directed severaldocumentaries, including Shajarat al-laymun/The Lemon Tree (1993),Musimzar` al-banat/Planting of Girls (1999), DieReise der KöniginTeje/Journey of a Queen (2003) and Jannat `Ali-Ali imParadies/My Name is not Ali (2011).