George Azar and Mariam Shahin will screen and speak about their two powerful films: The Gaza Fixer, the human story of one man’s personal loss during the Gaza War, and Two Schools in Nablus, where teachers at a boys and a girls school work to educate students living under the Israeli occupation.

George Azar has covered the Middle East and Arab/Islamic culture for the past 29 years from Beirut, Jerusalem and Gaza. He is a recipient of television’s 2007 Rory Peck Award for his film The Gaza Fixer. The following year his film, Two Schools in Nablus won the Japan Prize and the U.K. Royal Television Society’s Education Award.

As a photojournalist, Azar’s work has appeared on the front pages of The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Economist, Newsweek, the Philadelphia Inquirer and other leading newspapers and periodicals. His photographs appear on the covers of many books, most recently Mahmoud Darwish’s State of Siege (2009).

He is the author of the books Palestine, A Photographic Journey (University of California Press, 1991) and Palestine, A Guide (Interlink Books, 2006).

Mariam Shahin, a journalist and author, has been living and working in the Arab world for two decades. She is co-author of Unheard Voices: Iraqi Women on Sanctions and War as well as guidebooks to Egypt and Jordan.