Sarah Trad

Sarah Trad’s project, Mountain Daughter بنت الجبل is an experimental film that explores climate change, mental health, migration, and Arab identity between the American Northeast and the Levant. The film uses character studies, landscapes, staged skits, and cinema verite documentation to connect sites in Philadelphia, Central and Western Pennsylvania, the Adirondack Mountains, Beirut, and Tripoli, Lebanon. Footage of similar mountain landscapes between New York and Lebanon will trace Sarah’s family’s migration as Greek Orthodox farmers between two different ranges. Using the mountain as a metaphor, the film will also show spaces of “climate decay,” or spaces of waste such as the trash mountain in Beirut, mountain landfills in rural Lebanon, construction waste sites, or ghost towns in Pennsylvania. Additionally, Sarah will document her father, sister, and queer artistic communities in Philadelphia and Beirut, incorporating them into these landscapes to explore queer dystopias, Arab American history, generational trauma, mental health, and climate futures. 

Sarah Trad's project, "Batikh Batikh", is a pop-up cinema and gallery focused on SWANA (South West Asian North African) films and solo exhibitions of local emerging SWANA women and queer artists. Based on an anti-capitalist art model, where all art is free to the public with featured artists paid, these screenings and exhibitions will provide programming that showcases SWANA and queer joy outside the Western gaze.