Film Categories: Arab

  • Bellydance Vogue

    “My birthday was on the 3rd of April 2020, and for the first time, I celebrated it all by myself. But even if I was alone, I decided to celebrate it as if it’s the last one” The film was made during quarantine, using archive films from the 80-90s and using VHS recorder app.

  • Cairo In One Breath

    Every day, people are being replaced by machines. The adhan is a 1,400 year-old oral tradition in the process of unprecedented change in Cairo. After 60 generations, thousands of individual muezzins are being replaced by a single voice broadcast from a radio station as part of a plan of the Mubarak regime. As the Adhan Unification Project takes hold, Egypt undergoes Revolution and regime change. The film follows muezzins from when they heard rumors of the AUP through its implementation, which since 2010 has displaced thousands.

  • Lunch Time

    In this film we drive through downtown Cairo. While exploring the urban life and daily routine of the streets near Tahrir square, we sink into a labyrinth where our path keeps on being cut. During the 2011 revolution it was often said that “the people took back the streets”, but since then the police and military have returned to power and show their supremacy by controlling the public spaces, leaving many to adapt to a system where they have no voice and must work around the obstacles that are left behind.

  • Primary Colours

    A cine-poem by Sudanese-Canadian artist Roua Aljied, aka Philosi-fire, about the realities of domestic violence and how each step a woman takes is a new colour to paint on the canvass of her life. Created in partnership with Women in International Security Canada and the 16 Days of Activism Campaign in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and performed live for the 2016 International Women’s Day ceremonies in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

  • Sira

    ‘Sira’, in Arabic, literally translated, means biography. Arabs are a people known for their oral tradition. Through excavated footage and narration, Sira examines the displacement of a family, beginning with the event that catapulted their exodus from Kuwait as a result of the Iraqi invasion.

  • Alia

    Haunted by the memory of civil war, an old Lebanese man revisits the last few moments of a fateful bus ride that leads up to the murder of his beloved.

  • Deema

    After years of living abroad, Deema is reunited with her childhood friend Nidal. When their love blossoms like the Arab Spring, a pain nested deep within suddenly re-surfaces as she fights to revive the phoenix inside of her.

  • Fresh Blood: A Consideration of Belonging

    “Fresh Blood” is a hybrid documentary blending personal narrative and a video-essay style. The piece engages issues of Jewish racialized identity, Arab/Jewish dichotomies and the ways these come together in Iraqi Jewish culture, and the personal implications of the politics of Palestine and of the Jewish holocaust. The artist returns to a land of remembering and forgetting. With her first language lost it is difficult to communicate with her grandmother, and yet there is humour and poignancy in their resulting exchanges. In seeking out her biological father, Yael questions the significance of blood relations. She revisits and revises family memory…

  • The Prince

    Olivia, a young tap-dancer and her uncle, Amir, an actor, struggle with what it means to be Middle-Eastern-American and artists in today’s racially divided world.

  • Kitâb al-Isfâr: Book of the Journey

    An immersive cinematic poem of a seven year journey of return, Kitâb al-Isfâr: Book of the Journey weaves together stories of near-death and mystical experience in Andalucia. When I was 19 I set out, hoping I could learn the meaning of life by “experiencing everything.” I bought a car for 20 marks in a cafe in Ulm. I spray painted it yellow and green and drove it from Holland to Romania to Spain, sleeping in the back seat in a red blanket. Driving down to Malaga, at the crest of the mountains, the brakes went out. As the car sped…