Film Categories: Arab

  • Landmarks of Memory

    A tattoo ritual and hookah session memorializes a pre-war flower shop. After seeing its storefront in archival footage of the Lebanese Civil War, a first-generation daughter seeks information and connection to place. Scenes of 1976 Beirut are paired with today’s developed landscape, while roses are etched and coconut coals burn in a snowy diasporic setting.

  • Yaffa

    Yaffa is a short experimental film in which space and time become meshed together to form the fragments we create our stories from. In those pieces of images, memories arise and stories retell themselves. It is through our mutual time, words, explorations and spaces that I realized my grandfather gifted me a home.

  • your father was born 100 years old, and so was the Nakba

    A Palestinian grandmother returns to her hometown Haifa through Google Streetview, today, the only way she can see Palestine.

  • Sultana’s reign

    Sultana of New York is a Palestinian drag queen, performer, and artist. “Sultana’s Rein” opens with a conversation with Sultana, as she is being painted by Jordanian artist, RIDIKKULUZ. Reflecting on her journey from Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, to then New York, Sultana tells of the challenges of performing drag in conservative societies, her nostalgia for the glory days and the glamour of Egyptian cinema icons, and her struggle to prove her existence and her self-expression as a performer and artist. She also shares her love of celebration and her everlasting commitment to be true to herself.

  • Les fleurs du mâle

    “The mysterious creature, Salma, realizes that being herself has repercussions on her life and that she will never be accepted as she is. So she decides to ask the creatress of this world for mercy.” The film was shot in super 8 in-camera edited. It was inspired by the letter sent by Charles Baudelaire to the Empress Eugenie after being censored and fined for his book “Les fleurs du mal”. The reason of the condemnation: offense to public morals and good manners as well as offense to religious morality.

  • Abgad Hawaz

    Robin Riad’s short hand-drawn analogue film ostensibly teaches the pronunciation of the Arabic Alphabet in 28 easy steps. In actuality, the hand-drawn letters were printed using a laser jet printer onto the optical soundtrack of 16mm film, and what you hear in the film is the projector reading the letters, and interpreting them into sound. Riad uses humour to play with and sit with her mother tongue, offering a ‘false’ lesson in pronunciation. A response to a digital form of anti-Arab hate that Riad witnessed online coming out of the genocide in Gaza, Abgad Hawaz is a way for her…

  • our voices in reverse (portrait of mama)

    My first analog film, filmed from the roof of my mother’s home in west Texas in summer 2013. An experiment in reversing roles, and the precursor to a feature film that came several years later. Edited in camera on Super 8 black and white reversal film.

  • Amal’s Garden

    Amal and Mustafa are an Iraqi Turkman couple that have shared a long life together in northern Iraq. When Amal decides to renovate their home after a decade of war, Mustafa retreats to the garden, where he encounters the curious gaze of his grandniece and her camera.

  • Jaddoland

    A visit to my mother’s home art studio in Texas prompts a deeper exploration into the meaning of home across generations and landscapes.

  • Echolocation

    The rain in Oakland, my grandmother’s home in Baghdad, my aunts’ voices in What’s App, my daughter learning to count to 10, my brother playing the darbuka, the cicadas in Texas, the walls of my studio, the search for new forms.