Mira Sidawi

Mira Sidawi
Born
Beirut, Lebanon
CitizenshipGermany
EducationLebanese American University
OccupationsActress, director, writer
Children2

Mira Sidawi is a Palestinian actress, writer, and director.[1]

Early life and education

Sidawi was born to a Palestinian family in the Bourj el-Barajneh refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon. She was named, by her mother, after an eponymous character played by actress Hind Abi Llama in a Lebanese television series.[2][3]

Her father fled Sheij Danun, a town near Acre (today in northern Israel), in 1948 at the beginning of Nakba during which more than 700,000 palestinians were displaced after Zionist forces conquered territory to establish the State of Israel.[3] After leaving his home with no belongings, he set up a storefront in the countryside where he met and married Sidawi’s mother, who was also from Acre.[3]

The family was forced to flee to the mountains following the Lebanese civil war. “My father made a house of tin and stones, in which it was very cold in winter and we suffocated in summer,” Sidawi told El Pais, “We were very poor. I helped him clean other people's bathrooms by listening to Umm Kulthum's music. He was a fascinating man, who wanted to be a writer, but he couldn't. It is impossible to know what happened before, who he played with or what he dreamed of. You don't know what he left there, in that first part of his life.”[3] Before he was killed, along with her sister, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s, he taught Sidawi how to walk inside the refugee camp alleys without falling into open holes or being bitten by rats.[2]

Sidawi studied theatre at the Lebanese American University and worked as a trainer in media workshops across the Shatilla refugee camp.[4]

Career

Film

Sidawi’s first short film Four Wheels Camp (2015) was conceived as a tribute to her father and showcases the plight of palestinian refugees who wish to be buried in their homeland instead of a camp. “My parents are buried on my two brothers, who died before, because in the countryside there is no place to bury otherwise. Dead on dead. It scares me to have no choice and end up like this. I told my mother that I didn't want that for me, and that's where the film was born,” she explained.[3] Four Wheels Camp was selected to be screened at the Festival Ciné-Palestine in Paris and Beirut University Film Festival, winning the jury prize and the audience award respectively.[5] In 2024, it was one of the films screened at the Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences of Spain, as part of a colloquium organized by the Association of Women Filmmakers and Audiovisual Media (CIMA).[6][7]

Sidawi’s second project, Al Jidar (transl. The Wall), was released in 2019 and follows young Palestinian refugees, living in Lebanon’s Shatila refugee camp, on their journey to persuade Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters to play a concert in their camp.[8][9]

In 2023, Sidawi was among five filmmakers selected by filmlab Palestine and Cinephilia Productions to participate in the fourth edition of the Sunbird Stories program that aimed to support the development of “imaginative and thought-provoking short films” targeting Arabic-speaking children.[10] Her resulting film The Bulldozer follows a young palestinian boy Ali and is set against the backdrop of a refugee camp.[3]

Sidawi was one of the twenty three documentary filmmakers who received a 2025 grant from Arab Fund for Arts and Culture.[11]

Theatre

Sidawi acted in several stage productions as a student at the Lebanon American University (LAU). In 2012, she appeared in Mathhab, adapted and directed by Lina Khoury. The play was based on Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour.[12] In 2017, she was seen in Ayyoubé, LAU’s alumni theatre production that was written and directed by Awad Awad.[13]

In 2022, Sidawi appeared in the Arabic radio production for Ismail Khalidi’s play The Last Machine.[14] The play was commissioned by Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University for its NO PLACE/ LA MAKAN project.[15] In 2025, she performed in an Médecins Sans Frontières production of Gaza – Aita ash Shab – Gaza at the Le Monnot Theatre in Beirut. The play, directed by Lina Abyad, showcased firsthand testimonies of women who have survived the occupation in Palestine and Lebanon.[16]

Writing

In 2017, Sidawi was part of Beirut Short Stories, a collaboration between KfW Stiftung and the Goethe-Institut to promote young literary talent in the Middle East. The writers developed short stories under the guidance of industry veterans such as Abbas Khider and Dima Wannous. Selected entries including Sidawi’s “The Story of Nasr” about a Palestian refugee boy, were later translated and published in Arabic and English on adda (the online literary magazine by Commonwealth Foundation).[17][18]

In 2018, Perla Issa, researcher and senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS), conceptualized an autobiographical writing workshop for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Sidawi was one of the eleven people selected through an open call to attend twelve sessions of the Beirut-based workshop. The participants convened weekly to share manuscripts and explore other creative writing ideas under the guidance of Lebanese writer and journalist Hassan Daoud. In October 2022, IPS collaborated with OR Books to jointly publish 11 Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exile, a resulting anthology of participant contributions edited and translated from Arabic by Muhammad Ali Khalidi, presidential professor of philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center.[19] Ghenwa Hayek, associate professor of modern arabic literature at University of Chicago, praised the book for bringing “vibrancy and vitality” to the stories of contemporary Palestinians that remind “the reader of the multitudinous experience of Palestinian refugees.” British playwright Caryl Churchill noted that the stories presented “vivid accounts of a world we know too little about.” Additionally, journalist-academic Moustafa Bayoumi said that the book was managed to unite the “indomitable spirit of Palestinian survival with the transformative potential of first-person narratives” through “a deeply humane, precisely detailed, and intimately drawn collection of refugee stories.”[20]

Sidawi is currently working on her first book Tell Sleep to Sleep, which has received funding from Mophradat, a Brussels-based international nonprofit association that supports Arab artists.[21]

Personal life

After the Nakba, Israel disallowed the return of displaced palestinian refugees; as a result, Sidawi has never been to Acre.[22] She has been outspoken about Israel’s occupation of Palestine, the ground realities of being a refugee, and the challenges of filmmaking as a Palestinian woman.[3][23][24][25]

Sidawi divides her time between Lebanon and Berlin, Germany, where she lives with her husband and two children.[26]

References

  1. ↑ "Mira Sidawi". adda. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  2. 1 2 Systems, Integrated Digital (2021-11-26). "Mira Sidawi: The Camp Is Full of Creativity and Inspiration - LPDC". Retrieved 2025-11-03.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Lecumberri, Beatriz (2024-05-15). "Mira Sidawi, cineasta: "Hay muchas formas de ser palestino, pero todas son complicadas, hoy más que nunca"". El País (in Spanish). Retrieved 2025-11-06.
  4. ↑ "The Wall by Mira Sidawi". Dar El Nimer. Retrieved 2025-11-03.
  5. ↑ "Mira Sidawi". Tasharuk. Retrieved 2025-11-03.
  6. ↑ CIMA (2024-05-14). "Mira Sidawi: "El arte es mi única arma para contar mi historia. Quizás así el mundo haga algo"". CIMA (in Spanish). Retrieved 2025-11-06.
  7. ↑ Cabrera, José Manuel Romero (2024-05-14). "Mira Sidawi: "Los palestinos no somos una moda. Estamos ante un genocidio y un momento crítico en la historia de la humanidad"". Cadena SER (in European Spanish). Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  8. ↑ "Pink Floyd inspires Palestinian refugees to get creative". almaktouminitiatives.org. 15 Jan 2019.
  9. ↑ "'The Wall' by Mira Sidawi". Dar El Nimer. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  10. ↑ "OFFICIAL SELECTION: 4th edition SUNBIRD STORIES - Cinephilia X Filmlab Palestine 2023". Cinephilia. Retrieved 2025-11-03.
  11. ↑ "AFAC". www.arabculturefund.org. Retrieved 2025-11-06.
  12. ↑ "Play it out of tune! | LAU News". LAU | News. 2012-12-17. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  13. ↑ "Ayyoubé, a tribute to Palestinian refugee women | LAU News". LAU | News. 2017-05-08. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  14. ↑ CPS (2022-11-21). "NO PLACE | لا مكان". Center for Palestine Studies | Columbia University. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  15. ↑ Studies, Palestine (2022-11-21). "NO PLACE | لا مكان Radio Play Initiative". Center for Palestine Studies | Columbia University. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  16. ↑ "MSF Play "Gaza – Aita ash Shab" Amplifies Women's Voices". Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  17. ↑ Sidawi, Mira (2018-05-11). "The Story of Nasr". adda. Retrieved 2025-11-03.
  18. ↑ "Insight Nahost". Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (in German). 2018-05-06. Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  19. ↑ "11 Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exile". Institute for Palestine Studies. Retrieved 2025-11-03.
  20. ↑ 11 Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exile.
  21. ↑ "Mira Sidawi". Tasharuk (in European Spanish). Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  22. ↑ Manna 2022, pp. 128–129, "Israel opened its doors to the Jewish diaspora of the world so that they could 'return' and live in Israel, but slammed them shut in the face of Palestinians who had been forced to migrate from their homes only yesterday."; Khalidi 2020, p. 75, "None were allowed to return, and most of their homes and villages were destroyed to prevent them from doing so."; Slater 2020, p. 94, "For that reason, as well as its "transfer" ideology and security concerns, the Israeli government decided to block the return of the Palestinian refugees – the survivors of the Nakba who had fled into neighboring Arab states – by any means necessary. As Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary in the summer of 1948: the return of the refugees 'must be prevented ... at all costs.'"; Bashir & Goldberg 2018, p. 7, "And it is the State of Israel that has prevented the return of the refugees since the end of the war."; Sayigh 2009, p. 165, "A central aspect of Al-Nakba, and the one that has prevented any solution up to now, is Israel's steadfast refusal to allow the victims of expulsion to return."; Morris 2008, p. 411, "Few expected that their refugeedom would last a lifetime or encompass their children and grandchildren. But it did. The permanence of the refugee problem owed much to Israel's almost instant decision, taken in the summer of 1948, not to allow back those who had fled or been expelled. The Zionist national and local leaderships almost instantly understood that a refugee return would destabilize the new state, demographically and politically. And the army understood that a refugee return would introduce a militarily subversive fifth column. Again, it was Shertok who explained: "We are resolute not to allow anyone under any circumstances to return. . . . [At best] the return can only be partial and small; the solution [to the problem] lies in the resettlement of the refugees in other countries.""; Pappe 2006, p. 224, "The dispossession of Palestinian lands did not only entail the expulsion of their legal owners and the prevention of their repatriation and regaining ownership. It was compounded by the reinvention of Palestinian villages as purely Jewish or 'Ancient' Hebrew places."; Masalha 2003, p. 41, "The official Israeli position has always been that there can be no return of the refugees to Israeli territories, and that the only solution to the problem is their resettlement in the Arab states or elsewhere. Since 1949 Israel has consistently rejected a return of the 1948 refugees to their homes and villages; it has always refused to accept responsibility for the refugees and views them as the responsibility of the Arab countries in which they reside."; Schulz 2003, pp. 33 ("What is beyond any doubt is the Israeli refusal to allow refugees to return after the war.") and 139 ("International diplomacy attempting to deal with the refugee issue has since the 1950s focused on resettlement somewhere else, as Israel would not admit any process of return, due to the sensitive demographic nature of Israel.")
  23. ↑ Schanda, Susanne (2024-02-10). "Für Palästinas Autoren ist Exil ihr Leben". Neue Zürcher Zeitung (in German). Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  24. ↑ Ibáñez, Eva (2024-05-14). "Mira Sidawi, cineasta palestina: "El dolor de no tener una tierra se queda siempre dentro de ti"". www.publico.es (in Spanish). Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  25. ↑ CIMA (2024-05-14). "Mira Sidawi: "El arte es mi única arma para contar mi historia. Quizás así el mundo haga algo"". CIMA (in Spanish). Retrieved 2026-07-19.
  26. ↑ Madrid
    , Por EFE/Alicia G. Arribas en (2024-05-16). "Mira Sidawi: "Intento usar el arte para expresar lo que siento y responder cuestiones en torno a la vida"". La Crónica de Hoy (in Spanish). Retrieved 2026-07-19.
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