Universal Games by Mariam Ghani (USA, 2000, 2:20 min., Beta SP)

Synopsis:
Universal Games manipulates footage from one week of New York network TV news in October 2000, when the two top stories were the “Subway Series” between the Yankees and the Mets and the escalation of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, exposing an unnerving similarity in the media’s reporting on stories of wildly varying gravity.

Post-screening panel discussion with Ali Bâli (ADC-New York Chapter). Nelly Alorabi
(Deputy Consul, of Egypt in New York) and Khaled Fahmy (NYU) This program was made possible through the NYU Film Department’s Directors’ Series. 

Biography:
Mariam Ghani was born in New York in 1978 to an Afghan father and Lebanese mother. In her practice as a media artist, she uses these multiple identities to position herself as a translator, revealing channels of communication between cultures that consider themselves foreign to each other. She received a B.A. with honors in Comparative Literature from NYU in 2000, where she was an Acton Scholar, and an MFA in Photography, Video & Related Media from SVA in 2002, where she received the Aaron Siskind Memorial Scholarship. She was a Soros New Americans Fellow from 2001-02, a Bronx Museum Artist in the Marketplace from 2002-03, and is currently a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Artist in
Residence in the Woolworth Building. Ghani has exhibited her work in video, installation and new media nationally and internationally since 1999, including recent screenings at the New York Video Festival, the Asia Society, and the Curtacinema Festival in Rio de Janeiro.

Her ongoing web-based public dialogue and interactive documentary project about the reconstruction of Kabul can be seen online at www.kabul-reconstructions.net and has been covered in The New York Times, the BBC World Service, ArteNews and Falter.

Festivals & Awards:
Installation at Talwar Gallery, NYC, 2002
Installation at Judson Church, NYC, 2003)
Middle East Film Series of the Kevorkian Center & Center for Media, Culture and
History at NYU, 2001
Fletcher School of International Diplomacy at Tufts University, 2002
The Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art in Yerevan, Republic of Armenia, 2001