Screening of The Golden Harvest and conversation with filmmaker Alia Yunis
Monday, October 5, 2026 4:30-6:30 p.m.
Join the Kahn Institute long-term project Foodways: Rooted, Made, Shared, Imagined for a screening of The Golden Harvest, followed by a conversation with filmmaker Alia Yunis. The film is a 6,000-year-old love story in which Yunis tries to understand the profound, often troubled, relationship between olive trees and the people of the Mediterranean, including her own Palestinian father. It is a complicated romance, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, set in a region that includes some of the poorest and most conflicted areas of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
The screening is sponsored by the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute, the Center for the Environment, Ecological Design & Sustainability (CEEDS), Middle East Studies, Religion, the Lecture Committee, Italian Studies, and the Lewis Global Studies Center.
The event is free and open to the public. For disability access information or accommodation requests, email kahninstitute@smith.edu. To request a sign language interpreter, email arc@smith.edu at least two weeks before the event.
Alia Yunis
Alia Yunis is a writer, journalist, and filmmaker. She loves trees and intersecting fields of media, environment, and heritage. As a scholar, journalist, author, and filmmaker, her work has been translated into 10 languages. Her documentary The Golden Harvest has led to Tree Routed, a work-in-progress interactive platform globally connecting personal stories about trees, and she is now working on a film about the date palm.
Yunis recently won the inaugural Naomi Shihab Nye Award for a middle grade novel that revolves around a Christmas tree. She co-edited Re-Orienting the Middle East: Film and Digital Media Where the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean Meet (Indiana University Press, 2024) and Future Stories in the Global Heritage Industry (Routledge 2025). Her novel, The Night Counter (Random House, 2010) has been critically acclaimed by the Washington Post and several other publications and includes a very important fig tree. She teaches film and heritage at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Olive Oil Tasting
The exploration of olive oil continues on Wednesday. Join the students of Suleiman Mourad’s Food, Identity and Religion in the Middle East course, and Michele Monserrati’s Intermediate Italian Conversation course, for an olive oil tasting on October 7, 4:30 p.m. in Campus Center 001.
