Anaïs Elboujdaïni

Anaïs is a Montréal-based reporter, documentary filmmaker and poetry writer. She is one of the festival’s co-founder and the Programming Director for the MENA Film Festival and has been instrumental in shaping the festival’s vision as part of the programming collective. She holds a degree in Political Science from the University of Ottawa.

I decided to be part of the MENA Film Festival because of the key role this organization is playing in Vancouver and even nationally in bridging the gap between MENA/SWANA communities and the broader diaspora. My professional backgrounds are in the arts (I was president of a poetry prize in the Ottawa region), in social justice non-for-profits as a program coordinator, where I managed a team of ten employees and over twenty volunteers. I also bring an awareness of underrepresented communities such as Indigenous voices of the MENA/SWANA region by virtue of my own upbringing (as a child of an Amazigh-Moroccan immigrant) and of the Francophone minority within Canada.