Dear Editor,

I’m one of a small but feisty group of documentary filmmakers and educators who have been hosting an annual community based, artist-focused documentary festival at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder since 2020.

This year, we’re very excited to offer a satellite event in Nederland – free and open to the public – on Sunday, August 13 at 3 p.m. The Mimesis Documentary Festival will bring our 2023 Featured Artist Saeed Taji Farouky to the Backdoor Theater for a special presentation of his ecological film There Will Be Some Who Will Not Fear Even That Void (2013, 54 minutes).

Part expedition story, part personal exploration of man’s relationship with nature - this semi-fictional, experimental documentary was shot over two and a half weeks on a tall ship as it sailed around Norway’s Arctic Svalbard Archipelago. We are thrilled to bring Saeed Taji Farouky to Nederland for this event.

Saeed is a Palestinian-Egyptian-British filmmaker who has been making work around themes of conflict, human rights, and colonialism since 2004. His documentary Tell Spring Not to Come This Year 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. Saeed Taji Farouky was a regular human rights speaker and educator with Amnesty International for 10 years. He is also the designer and lead instructor of a radical, free film school that supports people from backgrounds underrepresented in the filmmaking industry, and co-founder of Safar, the UK’s only film festival dedicated entirely to Arab cinema.

The 2023 Mimesis Documentary Festival (August 15-20) will also screen his award-winning 2021 documentary A Thousand Fires at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, August 19, in Boulder at Dairy Center’s Boedecker Cinema. A Thousand Fires is a portrait of a family’s unregulated oil field in the Magway region of Myanmar, a country home to one of the oldest petroleum industries in the world.

More information about Saeed’s films and all the Mimesis Documentary Festival programming can be found at www.mimesisfestival.org.

I hope you’ll join me in giving Saeed Taji Farouky a warm welcome to Colorado on Sunday, August 13, 3 p.m. at the Backdoor Theater!

Thank you,

Sarah Biagini

Nederland

Lead Programmer, Mimesis Documentary Festival