Farah Atoui, PhD

Farah Atoui is a cultural organizer and a media scholar specializing in contemporary film, video, and visual culture with a focus on moving-image practices from the Arab world. Atoui’s work explores artistic interventions produced under conditions of struggle and duress—war, occupation, colonization, crisis, displacement– as both tools and spaces for resistance, as well as sites for critical knowledge production that re-energize solidarity and decolonial imaginaries. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University, where her doctoral research examined post-2011 experimental Syrian documentaries as countervisualizations to the representational regime of the refugee “crisis.” She held a postdoctoral position at Concordia's Communication Studies Department, in affiliation with the Feminist Media Studio. She is an independent curator and film programmer, and a member of the Regards Palestiniens and Regards Syriens screening collectives.

FMST 335 | Arab Cinema: Histories, Politics, Global Movements (undergraduate course, Winter 2026)
FMST 448 | Visual Cultures of Resistance: Contemporary Practices and Aesthetics in Experimental Film and Video Art (undergraduate advanced seminar, Winter 2026)
FMST 804 | Borders, Displacement, and Media (PhD seminar, Fall 2025)
FMST 204 | Approaches to Film and Moving Image Studies (undergraduate course, Fall 2025)
FMST 316 | Film and Moving Image Cultures: Media of Resistance (undergraduate course, Winter 2025)
FMST 620 |Borders, Displacement, and Media (MA seminar, Winter 2024)

Articles and chapters:

Farah Atoui (forthcoming). “Migrant Syrian Cinema.” Routledge Handbook on Popular Culture in the Middle East, edited by Caroline Rooney and Anastasia Valassopoulos. London:Routledge.

Farah Atoui (forthcoming). “Cinema as Translation: On Bearing Witness and Building Solidarity in Sara Fattahi’s Chaos.” Cinema of Global Solidarity edited Masha Salazkina and Matthew Croombs, Oxford University Press.

Farah Atoui (2023). “Of Place and Cement.” World Records Journal Vol. 8 

Farah Atoui (2020). “Return, Recollect, Imagine: Decolonizing Images, Reclaiming Palestine.” Postcolonial Directions in Education, 9(1), 8-42 

Farah Atoui (2020). “The Calais Crisis: Real Refugees Welcome, Migrants ‘Do Not Come’.” Moving Images: Mediating Migration as Crisis edited by Krista Lynes, Tyler Morgenstern, Ian Alan Paul. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. 211-228 

Other publications:

Farah Atoui and Nour Ouayda (2020). “Surgissements : poétiques de l’image vidéo.” Hors champ, Mai/Juin.

Farah Atoui (2016).  “S’approprier, re-monter, effacer, s’approcher: la puissance de transformation du cinéma dans ‘Recollection’ de Kamal Aljafari.” Hors champ, Nov./Dec.

Farah Atoui (2016). “Appropriate, Remix, Erase, Zoom-in: The Transformative Power of Filmmaking in Kamal Al Jafari’ s Recollection.” Offscreen, 20 (10).

2025 | Land Back: From Palestine to Turtle Island

A screening program that brings together the voices of Palestinian and Indigenous artists who, through their experimental film and video works, confront the systemic violence of colonial dispossession, displacement, and cultural erasure, while asserting their enduring connections to ancestral lands. Supported by Vidéographe. February 27, Dazibao gallery.

2024 | Beirut, The Encounter

A fundraiser and Lebanon solidarity screening, Oct. 25, Critical Media Lab, McGill U. Montréal

2024 | Resistance, Why?

A fundraiser and Palestine solidarity screening, Oct. 4, La Sala Rossa, Montréal.

2024 | Bye Bye Tiberias

A Palestine solidarity screening, in collaboration with Cinema sous les etoiles, August 15, Molson Park, Montréal.

2024 | Diaries of An Occupation

A screening of experimental short films on/from Palestine, preceded by a live musical performance by Sam Shalabi featuring archive footage from the Katsakh collection. Organized in collaboration with Hors champ and presented as part of the Cinémathèque Québécoise’s Experimental Cinema Symposium, May 31. 

2023-2024 | The Political Aesthetic: Displacing Resistance, Resisting Displacement

A screening series offering a framework to explore the notions of displacement, refuge, and creative resistance through the medium of the moving image across multiple geographies. October 2023-April 2024, La lumière Collective, Montréal, with the support of Concordia University's Feminist Media Studio. 

2023 | Gaza: Between Images and Bodies

A Palestine solidarity fundraiser screening, November 24, Sala Rossa, Montréal.

2017-2023 | Syria Sees You

An annual screening program of contemporary Syrian cinema that offers a glimpse into the multitude of experiences that followed the 2011 uprisings, and presents diverse perspectives of what it means to live in war, displacement, and exile. Cinémathèque Québécoise and Cinéma Public, Montréal. 

2021 | Making Revolution: Collective Histories, Desired Futures 

A video exhibition exploring forms and embodiments of struggle and revolution in the Middle East and North Africa. While the 2011 upheavals are often considered a turning point in the region’s political history, the works featured in Making Revolution engage with different temporalities, earlier revolutions, and their political and poetic legacies. Nov.11-Dec.11, Montreal Arts Interculturels (MAI). 

2021 | Queer for Palestine

A solidarity screening event featuring a program of queer Arab films that focus on the intersection of gender and sexual identity with the Palestinian liberation struggle. Organized in collaboration with Cinema Politica. Nov. 15, La Sala Rossa, Montréal. 

2021 | Revolution Until Victory

A Palestine solidarity outdoor screening and discussion, organized in collaboration with Le Sémaphore. September 8, Montréal.

2020 | Beirut Over and Over Again

A solidarity and fundraising outdoor screening of short films from/on Beirut, organized in collaboration with Le Sémaphore and Hors champ. August 27, Montreal. 

2016 | Dissonant Integrations 

A multimedia exhibition that questions dominant representations of race, ethnicity, and other forms of fixed identities, organized as part of the Ethnocultural Art Histories Research project, March 5-April 2, Z Art Space, Montréal.