Marsa Foundation (Arabic for Harbour or Anchor) is a newly formed foundation based in the Netherlands that aims to support freedom of creativity and expression by financially and organizationally supporting the cultural, artistic, film and media activities and spaces in countries and/or areas where such support is lacking.
Starting as an alliance between founders of Seen Films (Egypt), Comra (Yemen), and Barzakh (Lebanon); it aims at creating long term partnerships with these three organizations and other cultural, artistic, and cinematic initiatives and individuals in the Arab region, and Arabs in the rest of the world, to provide safety of operation, organizational support, and financial supervision. Marsa, aims at incubating cultural, artistic and cinematic programs and projects, while holding critical review of the way it performs such activities; often ignored considerations such as workplace hierarchies, safety and wellbeing of cultural workers, mechanisms of governance and oversight. Marsa believes that in transforming how civil society organizations perform culture, art and film, they can transform culture, art, and film themselves.
Mimeta’s support to Marsa started in 2022, under the partnership between Mimeta and IRIS. The support goes towards the development of the network strategy and programs that offer a cross-disciplinary exploration and experimentation of film, media, culture, and art; while extending this experimentation and creative practice to the structures of work themselves. With Mimeta support, Marsa will host a Rough Cut Station with Arab editing consultants to finalize editing of these films as well as engage with different artists/cultural practitioners to work on an overall narrative and presentation of the films, utilizing help from writers, researchers, designers, sound and visual artists.
The aim of the station is to interest and involve filmmakers in wider engagement of how themes and topics guided by social issues relate to their films, to allow them to seek narrative and structural feedback from outside of the conventional film world methods and formulas, and be guided by how their work will feed into an expanding cultural landscape. Also Marsa aims to introduce filmmakers to potential modes of screening and distribution that will allow them to expand their storytelling to outside the boundaries of the single-channel linear film; including direct or interactive web publishing, exhibition, and print.
