October 9 6:30 pm
The 2025 DC Palestinian Film & Arts Festival is excited to kick off (and welcomes back) the festival’s opening night with DC based Palestinian performance artist Fargo Nissim Tbakhi. Fargo’s book is a debut collection of poems which acts against the many languages—interpersonal, legal, literary, rhetorical—constricting the lives and meanings of Palestinians.
TERROR COUNTER is an hour long performance that moves through sections of varying experimentalism, from an invented visual form (the Gazan Tunnel) to all-caps queer ecstatic, attempting to carve out a space for the negotiation of an alternative subjecthood. The voices in this collection are driven by despair, futility, utopia, vulnerability and the spirit of a collective liberation; they move in search of a lyrical voice which can inhabit both the paranoid preservationist mode that facilitates Palestinian survival, and the imaginative possibilities that might make possible Palestinian life.
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a Palestinian performance artist and the author of TERROR COUNTER (Deep Vellum, 2025) and ANTIGONE.VELOCITY (Deep Vellum, 2027). He is based in Washington, DC.
Ages 13 and Older
Runtime: 1 hour and 30 minutes
Content Warning: Mild use of swearing. Mild references to self harm, sexual content, sexual assault, drug use, suicide, and infirtility. Frequently occurring references to violence. Frequently occuring reference and depictions of grief.