1982

Oualid Mouaness is an award-winning Lebanese American director, writer, and producer who grew up between Beirut and Monrovia. His work traverses narrative and documentary feature films, music films, music videos, and commercials. His debut feature film 1982 received the prestigious Prix Cannes Écrans Juniors, the Murex d’Or for best Lebanese Feature film in 2021, the NETPAC Award and FIPRESCI International Critics Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival, and the Khayrallah Prize from the Center of Lebanese Diaspora. The film was part of the official selection for the Festival Cinémas du Sud at the Institut Lumière in 2021, and was presented at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris as part of a discourse on war and education, pluralism, and humanist representation of Lebanese people in cinema. Lebanon also selected 1982 to represent the country at the Academy Awards in 2020. His short film The Rifle, The Jackal, The Wolf and the Boy was shortlisted for the Oscars in 2017. Over the years, his films and various productions have been nominated at the Emmy Awards, the Video Music Awards, and the Country Music Awards. He is a Sundance Institute Fellow and has called Los Angeles home for over two decades.

Paul Amar is Department Chair and Professor in the Global Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He also serves as Director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies. He is a political scientist and anthropologist with affiliate appointments in Feminist Studies, Sociology, Comparative Literature, Middle East Studies, and Latin American & Iberian Studies. Before he began his academic career, he worked as a journalist in Cairo, a police reformer and sexuality rights activist in Rio de Janeiro, and a conflict-resolution and economic development specialist at the United Nations. His books include Cairo Cosmopolitan (2006); New Racial Missions of Policing (2010); Global South to the Rescue (2011); Dispatches from the Arab Spring (2013); and The Middle East and Brazil (2014). His book The Security Archipelago (2013) was awarded the Charles Taylor Award for Best Book of the Year in 2014 by the Interpretive Methods Section of the American Political Science Association.