Pegah Pasalar, Suneil Sanzgiri
Pegah Pasalar (b. 1992) is an Iranian interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and film editor currently based in Brooklyn. Her autoethnographic practice encompasses video, installation, and film, exploring themes including identity convulsion, cultural memory, fragmentation, temporality, and displacement. Pegah is particularly interested in oral histories and modes of storytelling people use to refabulate the past. She is the…
Dina Amer
FIlmmaker Dina Amer in Conversation with ArteEast Special Projects Curator Lila Nazemian
Latifa Said
, 2016
, 29 min
Synopsis: Unquiet Days is the story of Fadila, a cabaret singer who escapes Oran after being threatened to death by religious fundamentalists. Algeria is in the middle of a civil war. She arrives to Aubagne, close to Marseille, to the home of one of her friends. But her friend does not live there anymore, so she wanders…
Moumen Smihi
, 1971
, 16 min
Synopsis: Shot in Paris after Smihi completed film school, Si Moh, the Unlucky Man is an investigation of the life of migrant workers in France. Connected to the Maghreb by postcards and to his fellow migrants by shared experiences of alienation, the character Simoh negotiates the industrialized suburbs of Paris as the subject of his intimate camera. Smihi’s…
, 2021
, 90 min
Synopsis: Cultural and intergenerational trauma erupt in this story about two sisters on the outskirts of Paris. After the siblings are torn apart, the eldest, Hasna, struggles to find her identity, leading to a choice that shocks the world. Director Dina Amer takes on one of the darkest issues of our time and deconstructs it in…
Randa Ali
, 2022
, 15 min
Ali, a young Egyptian living in self-exile in Los Angeles is visited by a memory of an old friend. Together they try to make sense of a past haunted by trauma and a present that makes no sense.
Lily Ekimian Ragheb and Ahmed T. Ragheb
, 11 min
An Egyptian living and working in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, reflects on his new surroundings through a series of images and observations. The resulting montage is a poignant cinematic postcard that explores the contradictory nature of the immigrant experience: at once lonely, frightening, and exhilarating.
Reem Jubran
, 13 min
Zaid, a young Arab-American amateur drag queen, has to confront his conservative father and ailing grandfather about his identity.
Jenna Mahmoud-Bosco, Shayma Aziz
Filmmakers Jenna Bosco and Shayma Aziz in Conversation with Haytham Saqr
Zayn Alexander
, 2018
, 9 min
Jad and Rania, a Lebanese couple living in New York City, struggle to achieve their shared dream of breaking into the acting industry due, in part, to the typecasting of Middle-Eastern actors. The combined pressures of juggling multiple day jobs and living so far from home begin to eat away at Jad, while Rania relishes…
