Hey, Mama
The short film visually explores the contents of a letter that a daughter writes but cannot send to her mother. It hints to the tragedies of her mother's family in Syria, and the tragedies in their own relationship with each other. The letter is a farewell, more than a letter penned in hope of reconciliation. They are beyond that possibility. It is a visual and verbal grievance for what has been lost, and what can never be recovered.
Death comes to a woman.
In the Winter of her Life
Solitude.
Poetry by Nizar Qabbani
Him
The Last Letter
oil paint & photography, poetry by Nizar Qabbani
Experimental Short Film Series
the search for her in a red lace dress.
The Performer
In Middle Eastern culture, many women are raised to believe that there must always be a severance between the public and the private life of a woman – her public appearance being the better, polished, more appealing of the two, her private one: messy, uninviting, embarrassing. For years, I’ve given beautiful, refined performances, while the dishonesty of it all tortured me. Many times, that performer continued to work even in my most private moments, stuck in her rehearsals, unable to stop. In the end, it has left behind a permanent war in the body, an exhausting splitting of the self that is both resisted and obeyed. I want to end the performance, but the truth of me is too unfamiliar to share still, hence the stiff migration between two bodies in the short film: the true one and the false, unyielding other.
Nahr w Matar [river & rain]
The Failed Film
Political Work.
-
Lebanon
The names of those killed in the August 4th explosion in Beirut.
-
Afghanistan
“Forough Farrokhzad’s poem “The Bird May Die” on a documentary photograph.
The names of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces, written on chiffon
