Manal Issa 2024
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Back Already? The Maryland Film Festival Settles Into Its New Spring Dates
Only five months after its 2025 edition, the Maryland Film Festival hosted its 27th installment from April 8-12. The Parkway Theater on the corner of North & Charles is set to be a permanent home for Baltimore’s longest-running independent film festival, which will now be held annually in the spring. The shakeup caused by the festival going on hiatus in 2023—which caused former MdFF programmer Eric Allen Hatch to launch his own festival, New/Next, which now runs regularly in the fall—is finally starting to settle, leaving Baltimore with two marquee festivals for independent cinema. The 26th MdFF, despite the competition for regional […]
by Alex Lei on Apr 21, 2026 -
“… A Singular Biographical Representation of a Subject is Impossible”: Elisabeth Subrin on Maria Schneider, Manal Issa and The Listening Takes
Drawing upon a 1983 interview the actress Maria Schneider gave to the French TV show Cinéma Cinéma, Elisabeth Subrin’s short film Maria Schneider, 1983 premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival and went on to win in 2023 France’s César award for Best Documentary Short. In Subrin’s film, three actresses — Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga and Isabel Sandoval — progressively interpret the text of Schneider’s interview throughout the 25-minute piece, with Issa strictly recreating Schneider’s original answers while Maïga and Sandoval adapt the text to reflect their own experiences in the film business, turning the work into, as I wrote […]
by Michelle Handelman on Jan 21, 2025
