{ "article": { "title" : "Brewing Through Blackouts and Blockades in The West Bank", "author" : "Catherine Tansey", "category" : "essays", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/brewing-through-blackouts-and-blockades-in-the-west-bank", "date" : "2026-03-25 16:57:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com", "excerpt" : "

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“My American passport has great value all over the world, except in this country. And my Palestinian passport has no value in the world, except for this country,” Madees Khoury tells me by video call from the occupied West Bank, where she lives and works as a brewmaster and general manager of Taybeh Brewery.

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Khoury travels often for work. She was in Scotland earlier this year and later flew to Boston, then Atlanta, slipping easily between trains, planes, and highways.

\n", "content" : "“My American passport has great value all over the world, except in this country. And my Palestinian passport has no value in the world, except for this country,” Madees Khoury tells me by video call from the occupied West Bank, where she lives and works as a brewmaster and general manager of Taybeh Brewery. Khoury travels often for work. She was in Scotland earlier this year and later flew to Boston, then Atlanta, slipping easily between trains, planes, and highways. “I felt weird because it was so easy moving around,” she says. “Living here, these past two years, especially, it’s been so difficult. We’ve been more stuck and isolated than ever. ”That tension—mobilty and opportunity abroad, yet restriction at home—shapes much of Khoury’s business. Taybeh, widely considered one of the oldest microbreweries in the Middle East, has a sterling reputation in the craft beer space But running a brewery under occupation has always presented a unique set of challenges. Since October 7, 2023 these challenges have intensified. Sales have dropped by 70%, settlers pose a near-daily threat in their violence, and increasingly strict movement restrictions have nearly asphyxiated basic operations. Yet despite this all, Khoury and her family continue to expand. In September 2025, Taybeh launched their Sun and Stone beer, a collaboration with the Glasgow-based ethical brewery Brewgooder, while also completing renovations to double their brewery’s production capacity. For Khoury and her family, Taybeh is not only their livelihood but direct action in support of a future Palestine. Khoury, who was born in Boston but grew up in the small Christian West Bank village of Taybeh, always knew she’d go into the family business. Her father was an avid at-home brewer before pursuing his Masters in Brewing at the University of California, Davis. In 1993, he returned to Palestine amid the cautious optimism that followed the signing of the Oslo Accords and alongside the behest of Khoury’s grandfather, who bought land, secured permits, and pushed to reunite his family in their ancestral homeland. “He even got a blessing from Yasser Arafat,” Khoury says. Khoury spent her formative childhood years on-premise. “I grew up in the brewery,” she says. “The whole family was hands-on, working together, and trying to build the business. ”With time, Taybeh, which has beers on the shelf in seventeen countries, built a reputation for quality and was one of the first breweries in the region to popularize non-alcohol beer. But operating a brewery in the West Bank has always required navigating a complicated and often fragile landscape of shortages, delays, frustration, and fear. Producing and exporting beer demands consistency. The fragrant, delicate hops must arrive on time and in the proper condition, and brewing beer is reliant on stable water and electricity access. Crucially, the finished product needs to be transported under proper conditions—cool temperatures and away from direct sunlight—to protect the integrity of the beer. For Taybeh, each one of those steps is laden with uncertainty. Transporting beer from the brewing in the West Bank to the Israeli ports, where it can be exported, remains one of the most persistent challenges. What should take roughly 90-minutes by trunk often takes days. “On the map, it’s an hour and a half,” Khoury says. “In reality, it takes at least three days. ”Because Palestinians cannot access certain logistics systems, Taybeh must work through Israeli shipping agents to book vessels and secure permits to pass through commercial checkpoints. But permits often aren’t issued until, “their excuse is, until they know what the booking vessel is, or the container number,” Khoury says, noting this usually happens at the last minute. These delays are costly, and not just financially but in terms of product quality. Beer is sensitive to heat and above 70 degrees Fahrenheit, it starts to degrade, the hops oxidizing and the flavors flattening into cardboard-like notes, what many people would refer to as “skunked. ” Laggy transport puts the Taybeh’s beer at risk, especially in the springtime and summer when soaring temperatures and a relentless dry heat bakes the land. “And it’s very expensive, costing twice as much to go from Taybeh to the port than from the port to France, which is a 7-day shipment,” Khoury said. Beer is mostly composed of water, which Israel has long wielded as a tool of apartheid against Palestinians to enforce systemic deprivation and control, has always been challenging to secure in sufficient quantities in the West Bank. The National Bureau for Defending Land and Resisting Settlements, associated with the Palestine Liberation Organization, says the current allotments of water are 52% for Israel, 32% for illegal settlements, and 16% for Palestinians. Water typically arrives to the village three times per week in the winter, but only once a week in the summer, which is insufficient to produce Taybeh’s commercial quantities of beer. Settler violence is further jeopardizing water access. In July 2025, settlers destroyed security cameras and other core infrastructure at the Ein Samia well, which distributes water across the West Bank, including to the village of Taybeh. In January 2026, they attacked again, rendering the well inoperable at the time. Settlers have also been casing olive groves that belong to Khoury’s family and have successfully prevented the Khourys from harvesting their land for three years. Rather than confront him, Khoury filmed him on a Facebook live stream, keeping her distance to ensure her own safety. “They can kill you. It doesn’t matter if you are Christian, or if you’re Muslim, or if you have an American passport,” she said. “If you’re Palestinian, you have no rights, and no one to protect you. ”As of October 2025, United Nations reported that settlers and Israeli Security Forces had killed 1,001 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7, 2023. Both the frequency and severity of settler violence have made residents re-consider travel between cities in the West Bank. “People are not moving around the West Bank because they’re too scared of the settlers—I’m too scared,” she says. Yet despite the arduousness and accompanying fear of running a business and living in the West Bank, Khoury and her family continue to pour themselves into the business and in Palestine. “We believe that in order to build the state of Palestine and to build the economy, you have to invest your own money, knowledge, experience— your children, your future—into this country. And that is what my family has been doing for 30-plus years,” Khoury says. It’s this belief that continues to drive Taybeh’s expansion and growth. “I’d love to expand to Egypt or another Arab country,” she says. “We’re in Japan, but I’d love to grow our presence in the far east. ”Taybeh’s collaboration with Brewgooder marked one step in Khoury’s international expansion plans for the coming year, while her experience promoting the collaboration in Scotland only furthered her desire to develop other markets for Palestinian beer. “In Palestine, you feel like you’re isolated from the world and alone in what’s going on. But when I went to Scotland and I saw the support and the Palestinian flag everywhere, it was very emotional,” she says. For Khoury, exporting Taybeh’s beer represents a way to share her family’s work alongside a broader effort to keep Palestinian products present on the global stage. “We’re contributing to the economy of Palestine, we’re employing people, we’re exporting abroad. We feel very proud that we’re getting the name Palestine abroad and connecting that with high-quality products,” she says. Back home, movement is constrained, supply chains are fragile, and the future can feel uncertain. But the brewery keeps running. “We are brewing in a state of complete uncertainty,” she says. For now, that hasn’t stopped her from planning what comes next. Pictures courtesy of Taybeh + Brewgooder" } , "relatedposts": [ { "title" : "Where Do We Direct Our Misplaced Lebanese Anger?", "author" : "Chrystine Mhanna", "category" : "essays", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/where-do-we-direct-our-misplaced-lebanese-anger", "date" : "2026-03-25 10:11:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/IMG_2873.jpg", "excerpt" : "

Having lived all my life in Lebanon, anger became my uninvited friend. I’ve grown angry at my government every single day. It was only natural to grow angry at a country that has been abandoning its people for the past decades, as we witness our generation endure the same history that our parents couldn’t escape. Without much acknowledgement, I left the country a year ago to study in London - after enduring an economic crisis, tamed uprising, the brutal Beirut blast, and October 2023’s war, was an intentional move. It was a decision to leave a place that never embraced those who believe in change’s tangibility.

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Even after half a year in London, my body couldn’t comprehend that I’m safe here. Something inside me knew that our country would not be left untouched, as clearly acknowledged and repeated by Israel in the past two and a half years. I was, unfortunately, right.

\n", "content" : "Having lived all my life in Lebanon, anger became my uninvited friend. I’ve grown angry at my government every single day. It was only natural to grow angry at a country that has been abandoning its people for the past decades, as we witness our generation endure the same history that our parents couldn’t escape. Without much acknowledgement, I left the country a year ago to study in London - after enduring an economic crisis, tamed uprising, the brutal Beirut blast, and October 2023’s war, was an intentional move. It was a decision to leave a place that never embraced those who believe in change’s tangibility. Even after half a year in London, my body couldn’t comprehend that I’m safe here. Something inside me knew that our country would not be left untouched, as clearly acknowledged and repeated by Israel in the past two and a half years. I was, unfortunately, right. Today, and as I witness my country’s rape from a distance, of course, my anger peaks to an unprecedented level. But perhaps, this form of anger is existentially different. As we move to other countries, we begin to understand our place, its complexities, and its beauties from a different standpoint. It didn’t take much for my rage to transform from a governmental level to a global one, nor to start reclaiming an Arab identity that I was never necessarily married to. Honestly, all it took was a few questions on whether Lebanon belonged in the Middle East for me to start cooking Lebanese food that I never cooked back home. If I’m being honest, it also took other unpleasant encounters. Like a drunk British stranger kicking me for wearing a Kuffieh in a pub. In his defense, he also had some anger in him. The anger he held after witnessing a 500,000-person protest against Israel’s genocide in Palestine was uncontrollable. He couldn’t comprehend why so many people were wearing what he called a “terrorist” sign. So he directed his anger towards the unfamiliar migrant, me. Not to equate his barbaric anger with mine, but the source of my anger is different. Instead of stemming from a lack of understanding, it stems from watching your people get divided, erased, and massacred. It stems from observing your homeland and the places you adored and discovered yourself, get destroyed. It comes from seeing the baggy eyes of your loved ones over a screen that I feel like smashing into the wall every morning. It comes from feeling tied up. Unlike his, my anger is not optional, the kind that cripples your hands and haunts you in nightmares of your friends dying under bombardment. It comes from disappointment in the world’s oblivion to injustice. From trying to tame it, only to find your body naturally reacting in the form of panic attacks. From knowing that your parents never experienced the pleasures of reading a slow book in the park, retiring in a home they owned, or touching the small luxuries of life, without being interrupted by violence or instability. It comes from holding this reality while living in contrasting, untouched countries that feed on your destruction, while portraying the opposite context. Interrupted RomanticizationBy the beginning of the year, I was slowly trying to understand why I was transforming into a romanticized version of myself. I was catching myself listening to Arabic music, beautifully describing the country that angers me, and anxiously moving away from conversations that normalize our instability. I knew what I was doing. I knew that I was accommodating my anger to a new environment that shies away from the complexities of our context, and the colonialist realities that made our two worlds so polarized. Somehow, and like a chameleon, I knew that my tone towards my country must be different here. Mind you, I’m still the same angry woman who witnessed her own government steal from her own people, seize their money, neglect their basic needs, oppress them, and attempt to erase their collective memory in any way possible. But this was not going to be my story at home in the west. Living here, my body transformed its anger towards systemic abandonment of our country, its deliberately weakened system, the continuous bombs, and 10,000 Israeli violations of Southern lands, despite the world’s deception of “ceasefire” this past year. Here, I romanticize Lebanon in a cringy manner, but mostly defend it. The story I choose to tell is how our own government, the same one I am deeply furious at, had been shaped by colonialist and neo-colonialist frameworks. How international silence for Israel’s human rights and humanitarian law violations must not be normalized. How our country’s placement in the crosshairs of violence must not be the usual. Coming from a small country like Lebanon makes it harder to unpack the complexities of a place that can be so tiny and hold so much violence and anger, so I chose to romanticize it by making an outstanding Bazella w Rezz. I never touched a pan or liked Bazella w Rezz back home. This romanticization, however, did not last. Anger Amid War Cannot Be RomanticSince March 2, 2026, and as Israel continues to kill hundreds, destroy Lebanon, and displace more than one million people in just two weeks, my anger grows towards the opposite horizon. In times like these, I would rather be home. I would rather be home, in solidarity with my loved ones, grieving with my people, in support of every aching body, and in respect to those who are losing their homes to Israeli displacement. In times like these, I acknowledge my love towards an unfamiliar home so loudly and fully understand it. In times like these, my understanding of home is not romantic, but deeply political. I want to be in the only place that acknowledges what we’ve been through as the world gaslights its own complicity in creating what we’ve been through. In times like these, I recall that empathy is deeply political. This is exactly when the political world tricks us into believing that empathy and politics are opposing contrasts, as it limits our imagination, dismisses our realities, and gaslights our daily misery. This is exactly when solidarity against aggression becomes an essential form of resistance. This is also when my anger towards the world doesn’t need to hide behind romance.  Instead, it stands alone as a resistance against a world that normalizes bombardment images and displaced children from the global south. It’s a continuous confrontation that Global North spaces that lack will, information, and understanding of our context are not passive. The systemic construction of our underdevelopment can make us forget that this categorization was never accidental–and forgetting that is dangerous. One simple reminder that mustn’t leave our memory is the League of Nation’s categorization of nations into so-called ‘backward’ and ‘advanced’ societies through its mandate system in 1920. Under this system, former colonies and territories of defeated powers were ranked into three classes based on their perceived level of ‘civilization’ and readiness for self-governance. This framework, widely criticized as a tool of imperialism disguised as humanitarianism, continued to justify European control over colonized people. While we may have forgotten it, it is essential for our memory as colonized people to recall it today. In times where our country is almost driven into intra-conflict directions, the colonized people who had systematically seen our government repeat the same colonial practices against its people might need to understand that our liberation was never achieved. Instead of directing it towards each other, we, the Lebanese, might need to redirect our anger elsewhere. We cannot, however, deny our anger towards our government, those who capitalized on us in the name of resistance, and those who are invading our land, especially after witnessing the slow consequences of this denial over the years. As I observe the Lebanese throwing their understandable and misplaced anger towards each other, I fear horrific internal escalations and wonder if directing our anger outwards is more productive. Since its independence, Lebanon has always been afflicted with a slow violence that fuels our anger. As Israel commits its quickest and loudest violence against it, we owe our home a better-placed anger towards an international system that turns a blind eye to this violence; towards international frameworks that were placed for the exact purpose of prohibiting this violence. As we witness a colonizing change in the country’s fabric, and as the west misplaces our country on the map, I wonder why we were never offered space. Perhaps it’s the fact that Lebanon doesn’t have much to offer to resource extractors, or the fact that Lebanon is insignificantly small and fragmented, never given negotiation space on war tables. Under these hopeless circumstances,  reclaiming our narrative and culture is the only response we have left. I do not claim to know if redirecting this anger can create real impact, but I do know that at the very least, it will create a space for our defying voices, in a world that refuses to listen to them. " } , { "title" : "Criterion’s Ashley Clark: Loving Black Cinema Also Means Protecting It", "author" : "Cady Lang", "category" : "interviews", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/criterions-ashley-clark-on-why-loving-black-cinema-also-means-protecting-it", "date" : "2026-03-24 08:30:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/Ashley-Clark-Portait.jpg", "excerpt" : "

How do you define Black cinema? It’s a question that’s seemingly impossible to answer, given its vast and rich history, but one that feels more urgent than ever as the Trump administration is actively attempting to erase Black history and culture. The writer and Criterion Collection’s Curatorial Director Ashley Clark, however, has proven he’s more than up to the challenge with The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films. The book is a dazzling and expansive chronological survey of over a century’s worth of Black films, spanning multiple countries and genres, and makes the case that Black cinema is not only global in its scope but also accessible in its reach.

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“I’ve often found that Black cinema has been overlooked and marginalized,” Clark told Everything Is Political. “I certainly wasn’t exposed to a lot of Black film growing up, as a burgeoning teenage cinephile. This kind of book would have been really helpful and useful for me [growing up], and that’s who I had in mind when I was writing.”

\n", "content" : "How do you define Black cinema? It’s a question that’s seemingly impossible to answer, given its vast and rich history, but one that feels more urgent than ever as the Trump administration is actively attempting to erase Black history and culture. The writer and Criterion Collection’s Curatorial Director Ashley Clark, however, has proven he’s more than up to the challenge with The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films. The book is a dazzling and expansive chronological survey of over a century’s worth of Black films, spanning multiple countries and genres, and makes the case that Black cinema is not only global in its scope but also accessible in its reach. “I’ve often found that Black cinema has been overlooked and marginalized,” Clark told Everything Is Political. “I certainly wasn’t exposed to a lot of Black film growing up, as a burgeoning teenage cinephile. This kind of book would have been really helpful and useful for me [growing up], and that’s who I had in mind when I was writing. ”The book also functions as an archive of Black cinema, which feels overwhelmingly necessary in this moment—as Trump-era policies have cut funding for cultural institutions in the U. S. like the National Museum of African American History and Culture to imposing tariffs and travel bans that have had global repercussions for all industries, including film. For Clark, loving Black cinema also means protecting it. “Don’t be silent. Don’t be quiet about it. Advocate for it. Support filmmakers. Write about it, talk about it, hold it to high standards. ”Clark spoke with writer Cady Lang about his lifelong love of film, why he wants Black cinema to be seen through an international, kaleidoscopic lens, and how film can fight systemic oppression. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Courtesy of Clark and the Publisher. CADY LANG: It’s a huge, somewhat daunting task to pick just 100 films to embody Black cinema. What drove you to undertake this?ASHLEY CLARK: What came to mind was to do something that looked at Black cinema through a very specific international lens. Often—and it’s not necessarily a negative thing—but when people talk about Black cinema, they’re automatically talking about Black American film. But I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to slightly subvert that and bring in films from Africa, from the Caribbean, from Europe, and see if I could draw some connections between them, whether that was from actors and artists like Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker and Melvin Van Peebles, who had spent time and made work in Europe, to international collaborations between the USA and Nigeria with the Ozzie Davis film, Countdown at Kusini (1976), or Brazil and Nigeria with the film, Black Goddess (1978). CADY: Why was international focus on Black cinema important for you while writing this book?ASHLEY: I think there’s so much Black film from around the world that deserves to be better known. It’s as good as any film that is made, whether it’s West Indies (1979) by the Mauritanian filmmaker Med Hondo, or Black Girl (1966) by Ousmane Sembène, these are films that deserve to be in conversation with the great international classics and it takes people to advocate and to make that case. This, for me, is just a contribution to that. It’s also a reflection of my own life—I have Jamaican heritage, I was born and raised in England, I live in America, so I have an international personal experience, and I wanted to channel that into the films I was writing about. CADY: There are films in the 100 that you selected that have complicated legacies, like Lime Kiln Club Field Day, which is one of the earliest surviving films with an all-Black cast, but also deals with some racist tropes (perhaps most significantly, actor Bert Williams appears in blackface). How do you think about films like this in cinema history, while also thinking about the fraught historical contexts that shaped them?ASHLEY: For me, every step of the way, it’s respecting the audience and trusting that they will be able to hold multiple complicated truths. It’s really about providing context and history and giving a framework to these things. Even in the short piece that I wrote about Lime Kiln Club Field Day (1913), which stars the great vaudevillian entertainer Bert Williams, a light-skinned black man from the Bahamas who came to America and became a huge star in Jim Crow-era America and was famous for wearing skin-darkening blackface makeup, I wanted to include multiple perspectives on him. He was the only cast member in this film to do so, even though he was among other Black cast members, and there are various suggestions as to why. His legacy has been criticized by filmmakers like Spike Lee as someone who was doing things that negatively would negatively affect the race. But then you have filmmakers like Garrett Bradley and RaMell Ross, who in their work, have used images of Bert Williams to further complicate his legacy and ask questions about authorship and how much control he had, whether he was wearing blackface makeup to protect his other castmates, so they didn’t have to do it. It’s about trying to provide some sense of historical or industrial context that can help the reader because it can be upsetting and difficult if you don’t have the requisite context to encounter the material. Courtesy of Clark and the Publisher. CADY: How did you strike a balance between commercial and more avant-garde cinema for your selection? I think a good example of this in your book, is your selection of Tyler Perry’s very commercially successful 2009 film, Madea Goes to Jail, which appears before Isaac Godfrey Geoffrey Nabwana (Nabwana I. G. G. )’s decidedly experimental 2010 film, Who Killed Captain Alex?ASHLEY: I had to set myself a series of criteria and guard rails; for example, one film per director. I wanted to make sure that there was a wide variety of genres and styles, highbrow and lowbrow. Just because I may not be the world’s biggest Tyler Perry fan or fan of the content of his movies, that doesn’t mean that he’s not a hugely significant figure in the broader history of Black film in America and beyond, because his work is explicitly speaking to an audience that has been underserved. He has a massive, predominantly female, African-American, often religious viewership in the American Heartlands, who haven’t been served for a long time. With that in mind, you can connect that to other audiences and filmmakers who were being underservedEven if there are potentially regressive tropes dotted throughout these films, they’re serving an audience that has been dramatically underserved. In picking something like Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail (2009), it’s in a continuum you can even throw all the way back to certain films in the race movies era by Spencer Williams. There’s a legacy there. And in the case of something like Who Killed Captain Alex? (2010), that allows us to talk about genuine DIY filmmaking. A lot of the films I picked are by filmmakers who did not go to film school and learn all the tricks of the trade; they did it their own way, the only way that they could, which was scrapping together budgets, coming up with these often wild and weird films that feel like six films rolled into one, because the filmmakers thought they might only get that one chance to do it. CADY: As a curator and a programmer, you’ve helped recover and restore lost and lesser-known work, like Zeinabu irene Davis’ Compensation (1999), which was recently re-released by the Criterion Collection in 2025. I’d love to know what the process is like for you to bring works that are lost or nearly lost back to audiences and why that’s important for you. ASHLEY: The number one rule for me as a curator or programmer is to serve the artist’s work. It’s all about them. Compensation (1999) was distributed by the amazing [non-profit media arts organization] Women Make Movies and was never really lost. Lost is different from just not necessarily being amplified and advocated for. I felt very fortunate to be in the position to put it in front of a larger audience; when I joined Criterion, it was one of the first films on my list to tell my colleagues about. To work with [Compensation director] Zeinabu irene Davis, who is such an inspirational and thoughtful person, to get the film in front of new audiences, younger audiences, is the reason for doing what I do. CADY: Did this book introduce any new thoughts about Black cinema or film in general for you?ASHLEY: Once I had made my selection, it was interesting to see this corridor of films in the ‘60s through the ‘80s, against a backdrop of African decolonization movements and rising Black international consciousness around the world, and how these films were in dialogue with each other. Intellectually, I knew it, but to actually watch the films and see certain stylistic things that were coming up in the films, like Burning an Illusion, a British film from 1981 about a woman’s political coming of age, and then watching Alile Sharon Larkin’s A Different Image, an L. A. Rebellion film from the following year, it was constantly opening up new windows on work that I thought I knew in ways that perhaps I hadn’t considered and sequencing the films in that respect was very enjoyable and moving for me. Also, finding out how certain things have changed and improved and certain things haven’t. It struck me watching Saint Omer by Alice Diop from 2022, and realizing, to my dismay, how much the film was in dialogue with [Ousmane] Sembène’s Black Girl from 1966, in terms of the lived experiences of Black African women in France, that runs counter to any comforting narratives of progress. This book is not a journey of progress where everything’s great—it’s very cyclical and things are coming up and intersecting and interacting in ways that are sometimes joyous, but sometimes painful. CADY: Did you see any recurring trends or themes emerge?ASHLEY: Trends are tricky. You see these moments where, especially in Hollywood, Black film is hot for a while, it’s profitable, everyone’s interested, and then the interest sort of falls away. You have this incredible explosion in the ‘90s. Spike Lee is the on-ramp to that. Then Boys n the Hood (1991). You have this explosion of Black studio filmmaking in the ‘90s. And then it falls away a little bit. You have Get Out (2017) and Hollywood is reminded that actually there are masses and masses of Black audiences who are completely underserved and want intelligent genre filmmaking that speaks to their experiences. And then it falls away again. It’s happened recently with Sinners (2025), right? People are surprised that it’s a massive box office hit and it’s like, “Why are you surprised?” That idea of Hollywood dropping the ball repeatedly as it comes to serving Black audiences came up. Another trend across the book is this idea of DIY filmmaking—industrious, independent, political work for filmmakers that were often only able to make one or two films and had so much to say and said it in the best way that they could. CADY: We’re in a moment right now in the U. S. where the Trump administration is actively trying to erase Black history and culture. I think your book acts as both an affront to that and an archive for Black cinema. What do you think are the best ways that we can preserve and protect Black cinema, especially in this moment?ASHLEY: Don’t forget our history. Don’t forget the history of the work—that’s a really important thing. In this book, there are filmmakers like Marlon Riggs with his film Tongues Untied that came under fire, you know, during another round of America’s culture wars. He was singled out as a kind of illicit and morally objectionable filmmaker. And he turned around and said, “No. ”A lot of filmmakers in the book have done the same thing, working in oppressive regimes, making explicitly anticolonial cinema. The book is a statement to remind ourselves of that history, that a lot of these issues are not confined to this present moment in time—although things feel really scary at the moment—these issues are cyclical, historical, and colonial. Oppression and state terror have been a feature of life for a long time and artists have always found ways to fight back against them. Write, create, support filmmakers, and don’t forget the work that’s gone before. It’s really important that we lift it up. CADY: Why do you think that film is political?ASHLEY: Film is at its best as an expression of artists’ personal visions, and the personal is always political. " } , { "title" : "For Lebanon's Vanina, Fashion Is Collective Resistance", "author" : "Joanne Hayek and Tatiana Fayad", "category" : "essays", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/lebanon-vanina-fashion-resistance", "date" : "2026-03-23 17:51:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/Vanina%20-%20Founders%20Portrait.jpg", "excerpt" : "

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It feels strange to be writing about fashion at a time like this. Lebanon is being invaded by Israel as we speak. The Gulf is witnessing unprecedented tensions. And worldwide, it feels as if we are entering a new world war.

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Yet here we are, continuing to design and create fashion pieces. What for? Why? How?

\n", "content" : "It feels strange to be writing about fashion at a time like this. Lebanon is being invaded by Israel as we speak. The Gulf is witnessing unprecedented tensions. And worldwide, it feels as if we are entering a new world war. Yet here we are, continuing to design and create fashion pieces. What for? Why? How?In some ways, these questions have been with us from the very beginning of our fashion company, Vanina. The brand itself started during a time of war. In 2006, as Lebanon was going through another devastating conflict, we found ourselves wanting to take action in whatever way we could. At the time, we had just finished school. During those weeks, we would gather in each other’s houses and start creating—crafting, designing, imagining, planning. This is where the first ideas of Vanina began to take shape. The project officially took off in 2007 with a collection of jewelry handcrafted from old Lebanese coins: one lira, 500 piastres, and 250 piastres. Every household seemed to have a jar of these coins. They had lost their monetary value during the civil war and the inflation that followed. Yet for us, they carried another form of value. They were a link to a country that knew how to keep going. The cedar engraved on their back, the delicate details of their design — holding memories of a pre-war era we had not personally known, but had heard so much about. Transforming these coins into jewelry felt meaningful. Something that had lost its official value could still hold beauty, memory, and significance. And that is how Vanina began. At first, in our bedrooms. Then progressively it grew into the creation of a small atelier and the training of women in handicrafts to handle our manufacturing. We met these women through NGOs such as Service de l’Enfant au Foyer (SEF), which connected us with women facing challenging situations—women caring for their children and searching for opportunities to work. We began collaborating with them, and they soon became our master artisans. Slowly, the local team grew as our international expansion also began to take shape. We started exhibiting our brand in Paris during fashion week, where we met agents and buyers and began receiving orders from retail stores around the world. One of our first resellers was Galeries Lafayette in Paris. At the time, it felt surreal. This international expansion also helped deepen our local roots and expand our manufacturing network in Lebanon, with many of the artisans who started with us still working alongside us today. As our range of products grew, so did our network of artisans. We built it organically and in a decentralized manner. We began working with new NGOs such as La Voix de la Femme and Arcenciel, which introduced us to more women—each with fascinating stories, diverse backgrounds, and a strong drive to learn, work, create, and support their families. We organized workshops where our master artisans trained new apprentices. Over time, these apprentices became master artisans themselves. Gradually, production began to move from the atelier into their homes. Each woman sets up a craft line in her own house. We provide the raw materials, and she produces the pieces, often together with family members or friends in her neighborhood whom she chooses to involve. Today, the network includes more than 70 artisans working from their homes, alongside more than 25 ateliers collaborating with the brand. We also co-create with them. We revive traditional crafts such as crochet and macramieh techniques, but in many cases we also develop new techniques together. Much of this experimentation involves materials that are difficult or nearly impossible to recycle. One example is Delicatesse, a line of evening bags we created for Net-a-Porter’s Net Sustain platform. The bags were produced using a parametric form of hand-woven origami. Each bag was patiently pleated by hand and upcycles between twelve and thirty-six chip packets. These single-use packets, composed of metallic and plastic layers, are extremely difficult to recycle through conventional systems. The discarded packets were collected with the help of NGOs, raising awareness about waste management challenges but also about broader issues related to processed food consumption and the need to rethink the way we produce and consume. Over the years, we have worked with many materials that carry stories. Materials that hold memory or meaning. We created a collection called Unlocked using old keys, inviting people to keep doors open at a time when cities and societies are increasingly defined by gates and silos. Another line, Ceasefire, used “disarmed matches”—matches that would never light a fire. The collection emerged during particularly violent moments in Beirut and quietly and colorfully called for a cessation of violence. In August 2020, after the Beirut port explosion that devastated the city and deeply affected its people, another project emerged. Like much of Beirut, our store and atelier were heavily damaged. As we cleared the shattered glass, we decided to rebuild and keep going. The fragments became Light of Beirut, a capsule collection paying tribute to the city—its people, streets, houses, beauty, resilience, and hope. We chose not to commercialize the collection. It carried the trauma of that day but became our way to cope and move forward, inspired by the extraordinary coming together of people in the aftermath of the blast; a collective energy, rooted in the Thawra, through which we lifted each other up. At the moment, we are working on a project called Rooted, which repurposes olive pomace into a new biomaterial inspired by our soil and land. The project reflects on the damage inflicted on ecosystems, flora, fauna, and the communities of southern Lebanon—populations that have repeatedly been uprooted and whose lands have been contaminated through successive Israeli invasions. Lebanon is a small country but an incredibly rich mosaic of religions, cultures, and backgrounds. We have had the opportunity to discover this richness up close. We have collaborated with Palestinian communities taking refuge in Lebanon, Syrian populations in the Beqaa Valley, and many neighborhoods across the country. In our atelier, on any given day, one can witness a microcosm of this diversity. Women and men of different religions and backgrounds working side by side—exchanging, collaborating, laughing. And resisting. Yes, resisting the madness the world is facing today. Through it, we choose to celebrate the beauty of our togetherness and the richness of our lands. " } ] }