I Am From Here, I Am From There: Writers in Exile – Film Screening and Discussion

Featuring: Aykan Safoğlu, Simone Bitton, Elias Sanbar, Richard Dindo and Gelare Khoshgozaran
Curated by: Nick Kouhi

Screening Online: July 19-30, 2025
RSVP: artearchive.org 
Available worldwide
FREE / $5 suggested donation

Screening In-person: Men of My Dreams, Off-White Tulips, and Mahmoud Darwish: The Land as Language
Date: July 29, 2025
Time: doors open at 6:30 pm, screening starts at 7 pm
Ticket Price: sliding scale $5-15 – buy here
Address: DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema, 87 Lafayette St, New York, NY 10013
Followed by a discussion between curator Nick Kouhi, and poet and novelist Sinan Antoon

I Am From Here, I Am From There: Writers in Exile presents films that blend fiction and documentary practices in their profiles of writers living in exile. From Mahmoud Darwish to Jean Genet, the writers in these films are either onscreen presences or spectral conduits for reflecting on the heterogenous aspects of diasporic identity. Spanning from Lebanon to Los Angeles, the program generates several connective threads that transcend time and space, complicating rigid notions of national identity and venerating the potency of the written word as instrumental to a dialectic that’s fundamentally rooted in affirming human dignity.

I Am From Here, I Am From There: Writers in Exile is curated by Nick Kouhi and is co-presented by ArteEast and DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema. This program is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents over 20 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. A selection of the program will be presented in-person at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema, on July 29th starting 6:30 pm. The screening will be followed by a discussion between poet and scholar Sinan Antoon, and the curator Nick Kouhi. The full I Am From Here, I Am From There: Writers in Exile program will be available online on artearchive.org from July 19 – 30, 2025.