Arts Activities Support

Mizna’s goals for the festival are to provide Arab American and Arab film artists support and exposure and to present for Arab and Muslim audiences, a rare chance to see their authentic experiences on the screen—films made by Arabs rather than simply about Arabs. The film festival will also reveal to those outside the Arab-American community the heterogeneity of Arab peoples, providing a rich, complex, and true source of cultural understanding. Mizna distributes surveys and film ballots after each screening to all audience members. The surveys collect feedback on the film screened, the festival experience as a whole, as well as demographic information. We will evaluate the project based on these data as well as debriefings with the screening committee members, staff, participating artists, and randomly selected audience members. We will focus on the general feedback and satisfaction during audience discussion, and comment cards collected following each showing. We will measure the robustness of audience discussions by noting their length, the number of participants, the divergence of viewpoints expressed, and Mizna’s 14th Twin Cities Arab Film Festival enthusiasm for the discussions. Evaluation results will be shared with the festival team, Mizna's staff and board, and sponsors and funders.