Film Categories: Arab

  • Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf

    An Arab-American girl tries to come to terms with her sexuality while balancing the mores of two different cultures. As she faces a series of trials on confrontations, will she shed her passivity, or will her spirit be broken? Arabic/Hebrew with English sub-titles. Selected Screenings: 2006 Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah

  • Don’t Forget The Water

    A phone conversation sets the diasporic table as a disembodied figure prepares Qahwah Arabi / Arabic Coffee. Here, the contradictions inherent in Google Translate’s instant camera feature are made visible through glitched mistranslations. Using these flaws as a prompt, the communication between a mother and a daughter considers ambiguity as a source of embodied knowledge. 

  • Traces / آثار

    In the midst of the rubble of a torn building, a reel of film. An unlikely unraveling of queer bodies taking shape and form, while the war-torn city around and its spectacle of toxic masculinity glitches and disintegrates.

  • Fragmentasia

    An exploration of the sense of self, through kaleidoscopic imagery, distorted sounds, and a flurry of colours. Fragmentasia is a self-reflexive short, shot on 16mm and Super8, using animation techniques, prisms, and mirrors, to examine the outward self versus the internal self.

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • Six Months

    “Six Months” (2023) is a critique of alcohol within a North American cultural context, through societal pressure and mass marketing. It challenges notions of perfection in maintaining sobriety and the stigma surrounding relapse. This project uses different types of alcohol in its developing process, as well as multiple in-camera exposures, transforming alcohol from an intoxicant to an artistic tool.

  • Blood on The Square: Surviving Rabaa

    Blood on The Square: Surviving Rabaa is a documentary about the Rabaa massacre in Egypt, described by Human Rights Watch as “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history.” Canadian-Egyptian filmmaker, Mohamed Dawood, who witnessed and survived the military-led massacre embarks on a journey of healing by seeking out other survivors who were present in Rabaa on that fateful day.

  • 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.