By: Ashima Shukla, Staff Writer
SFU’s Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies (CCMS) film club was created by Parsa Alirezaei, a research assistant (RA) at the centre, along with Joseph Methuselah, a fellow RA and filmmaker, and coordinator, Kylie Broderick. Its purpose is to use cinema for fostering dialogue around Muslim societies, cultures, and diasporas, while also building third spaces that bridge the gap between academia and community.
For Alirezaei, the inspiration goes back to his time with the Iranian Students Club at SFU, where Friday film nights drew people together. “People start to engage with a lot of social questions, cultural questions. There would be discussions before and after the film. A lot of friendships were made, which was a really sweet part about it,” he recalls. So, when he met Methuselah at the CCMS, Alirezaei took this opportunity to carry the model forward.
Alirezaei doesn’t see the film club as an academic undertaking. Smiling, he clarified, “We really wanted to have something that was more intimate, right? The experience of going out and watching the film, not only for its artistic craftsmanship but also its subject matter. You know, you can hate the film too. We’re experiencing this together.”
The fall lineup also reflects this spirit of togetherness, showcasing stories across time and space. Cairo Conspiracy was screened on September 23, while The Message is expected to be screened on October 28, in time for Canadian Islamic History Month, and Something Like a War is scheduled for November 25. Each film opens a different window: politics and religion in Egypt, an origin story meaningful to many Muslims, the struggles of marginalized women in India facing state violence. In doing so, they carry forward CCMS’s mandate of shifting “the analysis from the notion of a single religious landscape defined by the religion of Islam to that of Muslims of different experiences and interpretations as agents in the construction of their societies and cultures.”
As Alirezaei explains, “We want to cover the geographic and sociological complexity of the communities that are within our mandate, and the communities that interact with them too.” True to this vision, the club is open to everyone, not just students or staff.
“We just want to create a community of people who want to learn about the world of the Middle East, of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the diaspora.” – Parsa Alirezaei, research assistant at CCMS
Film screenings are often followed by discussions shaped by the audience, from PowerPoint slides to guest lectures to spontaneous conversations. All you need to bring is your curiosity, and you’ll find yourself engaging in conversations grounded in situated knowledge, from members who bring lived experiences into the room.
In the act of gathering around these films, cinema becomes more than entertainment. It becomes a bridge, a mirror, a provocation, a disagreement, a collective reimagining. And the medium of film, Alirezaei believes, is uniquely positioned to carry this weight. “I think what film does well is . . . to humanize an experience. There’s something about watching a human go through the emotions of being human in a context. This is why art can have a particularly big impact.” In the process of deconstructing these films, we come to understand how cultural production shapes our imagination — as portals into distant worlds, into lives as they are lived. It is one way we come to wrestle with power.
To take a seat in the circle, email CCMS at [email protected], and stay tuned for more screening announcements on their website.
