The project Carceral Cinema (2025/26), guest-curated by Misha Zakharov, aims to spark conversations. Carcerality, representations of prisons, and race and gender in the context of incarceration are explored through the lens of film.
Bringing the series to a close, this event is a tribute to Lebanese resistance fighter Soha Bechara.
The programme features untitled part 1: everything and nothing (1999), an intimate interview by Jayce Salloum in which Bechara appears wise beyond her years following a ten-year imprisonment in Khiam Prison, Lebanon.
This is paired with Randa Chahal Sabbag's Souha, Surviving Hell (2001), documenting Bechara's return to the prison-turned-museum before its 2006 destruction.
The event will conclude with a conversation between Sarra Gershallah, a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham researching women's prison memoirs from SWANA, and Rida Suleri-Johnson, co-organiser of the Birmingham-based regular series of Palestine solidarity events, Falasteen on Film, followed by an audience Q&A.
Misha Zakharov is a film worker and PhD researcher at the University of Warwick. Previous Carceral cinema events have included screenings of pioneering documentaries about women in North American prisons (May 2025) and a special event on state-legislated homophobia and incarceration in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia (April 2026).
