Join Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at OSU for "Gender in Cinema" at Darkside Theater. Experience powerful stories exploring gender, identity, and resilience on screen at our film festival in collaboration with Das Films with generous support from the Mellon Foundation, featuring Kristen Lovell's "The Stroll" and Lina Soualem's "Bye Bye Tiberias."

• The Stroll: 6 p.m. Wednesday, May 7 
• Bye, Bye Tiberias: 6 p.m. Wednesday, May 14

The Stroll documents the experiences of Black and Latina transgender women sex workers in pre-gentrified 1980s/90s New York City, detailing their survival through violence, policing and sisterhood. Through archival footage and interviews, the film creates a vital historical record of a marginalized community displaced by gentrification, connecting their struggles to the broader fight for trans rights.

Kristen Lovell is an American trans rights activist and filmmaker whose experiences navigating homelessness and sex work in New York City deeply inform her advocacy. Her directorial debut, the award-winning documentary The Stroll (HBO, 2023), reclaims her history and documents the lives of trans sex workers in the pre-gentrified Meatpacking District, serving as a vital piece of trans history.

Bye, Bye Tiberias is a documentary directed by Lina Soualem that follows the director as she returns with her mother, actress Hiam Abbass, to her mother's native Palestinian village in Israel. The film explores Hiam's decision to leave her family behind to pursue her acting career in Europe and delves into the lives and legacies of four generations of courageous Palestinian women, connecting their personal stories to the broader history of displacement and resilience.  

Lina Soualem is a French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker and actress, born in Paris. After studying history and political science at La Sorbonne University, she worked as a journalist and film festival programmer. Her directorial debut was the documentary Their Algeria (2020), which explored her paternal family history. Her second feature documentary, Bye Bye Tiberias (2023), focuses on her maternal Palestinian family and her mother, actress Hiam Abbass. Soualem has also acted in several films.