Language: Arabic

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • from where to where من وين لوين d’où vers où

    In the pieces I store and carry along my many different roads, my dialects may be signs of bruises but reclaimed they form the skin and voice I live in. Experiences of the where, from where, to where; a narrative amongst others. And as the words finally trickle through the needles, fingers seeping with tints trace the outline of whirling fields where I hang a jasmine branch on suspended necks and in the in-betweens, language soothes, swans mend, and the daily brings calm. We are the comfort of our multiples.

  • in the jasmine vines

    Shaping a memoir of my personal return, in the jasmine vines is an assertion that the amalgam that makes my complex identity belongs, gifted by my grandfather and his story and honoured by the generations following his. Forming an imagery of complex memory, archive, story and imagination, this film is a learnt way to place my existence within a narrative. And so, I look for the scents they carry in the jasmine vines.

  • Canada Park

    I walk on snow to fall unto the desert. I find myself on unceded indigenous territory in so called Canada, an exile unable to return to Palestine. I trespass the colonial border as a digital spectre floating through Ayalon-Canada Park, transplanted over three Palestinian villages razed by the Israeli Occupation Forces in 1967. Canada Park is an experimental video poem exploring the politics of dis/appearance of Palestine as narrativized, mapped and imaged in Google Streetview and early 20th century colonial landscape photography of the ‘Holy Land’, namely at the site of the village of Imwas which is theologically conflated with…

  • A MAGICAL SUBSTANCE FLOWS INTO ME

    A magical substance flows into me opens with a crackly voice recording. The voice is that of Dr. Robert Lachmann, an enigmatic Jewish-German ethnomusicologist who emigrated to 1930s Palestine. While attempting to establish an archive and department of Oriental Music at the Hebrew University, Lachmann created a radio program for the Palestine Broadcasting Service called “Oriental Music”, where he would invite members of local communities to perform their vernacular music. Over the course of the film, Jumana Manna—herself a Palestinian from Jerusalem—follows in Lachmann’s footsteps and visits Kurdish, Moroccan and Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, members of urban and rural Palestinian communities,…

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • 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.