Liguria, Italy (2019)

Mimera Films is the film production studio of Hisham Bizri.

Hisham Bizri is a Lebanese-born American film director, writer, and producer. He started working in cinema as an assistant director to Raúl Ruiz in New York City and to Miklós Jancsó in Budapest.

Bizri has directed 29 short films and has written a number of screenplays adapted from Gilgamesh, Jorge Luis Borges, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Al-Tayyib Salih, and James Joyce. In 2023, he released Elektra, his first dramatic feature film which he also wrote and co-produced with Mirna Shbaro in Beirut (available on Netflix, Apple TV+, and Google Play).

Bizri studied filmmaking at Boston, Harvard, and Chicago and taught at MIT, NYU, the University of Chicago, UC Davis, Boston, and the University of Minnesota, as well as in Lebanon, Korea, Japan, Ireland, France, and Jordan where he founded a number of filmmaking programs. Most recently, he has served as a tenured Professor of Film Directing and Screenwriting at Brown University in Rhode Island.

Bizri’s work has been shown in international venues including Sundance, Valencia, Paris, Beirut, Oberhausen, Tribeca, VideoEx, Cannes (Short Film Corner), Montpelier, Athens, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pesaro, Moscow, Minneapolis, Ismailia, 25FPS Croatia, Doha, Biarritz, Valencia, and Abu Dhabi film festivals. He also screened at the Louvre, Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts, Institut du Monde Arabe, Cinémathèque Française, Centre Pompidou, MoMa, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Jeu de Paume, and Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art. He had retrospectives in Boston and Minneapolis as well as at the Harvard and Anthology Film Archives (NY), among others.

Bizri is recipient of awards such as the Guggenheim, McKnight, Salomon, LEF, Jerome, Bogliasco, Rockefeller, Ford, Cairo International Film Festival Special Jury Prize for best screenplay, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy. In 2017, he was awarded The Andrei Tarkovsky Prize for best director in Chicago.

In 2005, Bizri co-founded The Arab Institute of Film in Jordan with the late Syrian filmmaker Omar Amiralay and Danish producer Jakob Høgel, with support from the International Media Support (Copenhagen) and the Ford Foundation (NYC). He served as Producer at Future TV (Beirut), Creative Director of Orbit Communications Company (Rome), and President & Creative Director of Levantine Films (NYC).

In 2019, he founded Mimera Films, his own film practice studio. Bizri lives between Paris, Berlin, and Manhattan. He is developing three projects:

1. Jesus, a feature film he adapted from a screenplay written by the Danish film director Carl Theodor Dreyer;
2. Phygē, a feature film he wrote which chronicles the adventures of three exiled “heroes” in a certain metropolis;
3. The Cloud Affair, a feature film he is currently writing about the doomed love of a young married couple.