Given Names

A name may be freighted with generations of family and cultural history. A name may serve as the catalyst for one’s own quiet but revolutionary reinvention of selfhood. What’s in a name? In Prénoms (Given Names), Nurith Aviv turns her attentive lens to the stories embedded in first names, tracing how identity is shaped, translated, and sometimes transformed across languages and borders. Structured as thirteen distinct chapters, each organized alphabetically from A (Agnès) to Z (Zeynep), Aviv invites friends and colleagues to tell their stories using their given names as points of departure. Through these personal accounts, participants reflect on the origins, meanings, and shifts of names across Hebrew, Arabic, and European contexts, revealing individual negotiations between heritage and self-definition. Allowing each subject the space for recollection and reflection, the testimonies accumulate, raising broader questions of belonging, assimilation, and cultural memory. Unfolding with clarity and restraint, the language becomes both subject and method. A gentle but rigorous meditation on how a single name can hold the weight of history. —Lori Donnelly

US Premiere

Nurith Aviv is a documentary filmmaker and the first woman to work as a director of photography in France. She has directed approximately twenty documentary films and served as cinematographer on around one hundred fiction and documentary works, collaborating with filmmakers including Agnès Varda, Amos Gitai, René Allio, and Jacques Doillon. Her work has been widely recognized with distinctions including the Édouard Glissant Prize (2009) and the Grand Prix de l’Académie française (2019). Major retrospectives of her films have been presented at the Jeu de Paume (2008) and the Centre Pompidou (2015). She also teaches at film schools in France, Germany, and Israel.