Hajer Al-awsi is an Iraqi-Australian writer and creative producer. With a history of curating and marketing art exhibitions and festivals, she joined forces with Western Sydney’s Arts and Cultural Exchange (ACE) to direct the very first SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) Film Festival.
The first thing we looked at was the old model of Arab Film Festival and how things were run there. They decided things by committee, which we decided to emulate – because you need to have a lot of perspectives in the room. So we put out a call out for six curators to come on board and we ended up with a really nice range of voices.
