Suneil Sanzgiri
, 2019
, 11 min
In 1961, fourteen years after India gained independence from Britain, the Indian Armed Forces defeated the last remaining Portuguese colonizers in the newly formed state of Goa. The artist’s father was eighteen at the time, and had just moved away from his small village of Curchorem to Bombay for school when news reached him about…
Basma al-Sharif
, 2007
In an empty room, a slideshow projection of abandoned places plays alongside the narrative of two girls who find themselves on the shores of a pre-apocalyptic paradise. Told through subtitle text that weaves fact and fiction together, the story of a massacre unfolds. When the image and text malfunction and the story is no longer…
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…
August 2023
Latifa Said, Moumen Smihi, Dina Amer
UN/BELONGING Featuring works by Dina Amer, Latifa Said and Moumen Smihi Screening Online: August 12 – 20, 2023 RSVP: artearchive.orgFree / $5 suggested donationAvailable in the Middle East, North Africa, United States and Canada In person screening: Sunday, August 13, 2023UnionDocs: 352 Onderdonk Ave, Queens, NY 11385Buy tickets here UN/BELONGING presents films that share intimate stories from the North African immigrant experience in…
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…
Dina Amer
, 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…
July 2023
Yto Barrada, Firouzeh Khosrovani, Nadia Shihab
FAMILY PORTRAIT presents a compelling program of personal works by filmmakers who courageously turn the lens on their own families, revealing the resulting fractures that shape the fabric of their personal identities. Through these films, the filmmakers embark on a journey of excavation, unearthing their family histories and sharing intimate narratives that illuminate the interplay…
Nadia Shihab
, 8 min
Echolocation is a film of voices distant and nearby: the rain in Oakland, my grandmother’s home in Baghdad, my aunts’ voices in What’s App, my daughter learning to count to 10, my brother playing the darbuka, the cicadas in Texas, the walls of my studio. As fragments resonate and accumulate, spaces of loss are subsumed…
Yto Barrada
, 2011
, 15 min
Barrada digs into her family history and narrates 16 myths based on unreliable narrators and unverifiable stories, illustrated with strangers’ home movies found at flea markets and archival films from the last half-century in Morocco.
