Filmmaker Usama Alshaibi came to the United States from Iraq as a child. To him, being American means being proud of who you are and where you came from in the face of overwhelming resistance.
(Ivy Winfrey reports for Next Generation Radio with Colorado Public Radio)
Carey Burtt and I talk about film, life and death.
“At some point in the middle of summer, with protests against police brutality and the conflicts on the streets in the United States, we questioned if we even needed a film program like this,” admits Alshaibi. “But I believe we do need artistic expressions and documentation during a historical time like ours. There is no singular narrative of what we are going through, but we are definitely going through a transformation collectively — and all these films are trying to make sense of our strange and dark days. In the end, I think there is hope…there has to be.”
Read … Read the rest
Like everyone else, Colorado filmmaker Usama Alshaibi’s life has been changed by the coronavirus pandemic.
As a teacher at Colorado State University, he found himself putting his classes online. And as a filmmaker whose work straddles transgressive cinema and documentary, often exploring Arab-American identity and his own experiences as an Iraqi refugee turned United States citizen, Alshaibi made a short, meditative landscape video about the strange historical moment we’re living through. It lasts just shy of a minute.
We caught up with Alshaibi to find out how he’s navigating the pandemic, to learn how it has affected his creative practice, and to discover … Read the rest
By Kyle Harris
Usama Alshaibi doesn’t think of himself as a model refugee-turned-citizen. He’s neither a poster-child immigrant that Democratic strategists could parade around as a shining example of what happens when the United States opens its arms to Arabs, nor the bomb-wielding anti-American terrorist that President Donald Trump would have us believe immigrants from Iraq must be.
He didn’t join the military or die fighting for the United States in its war that destroyed his home country of Iraq. He was an average student. He experimented with sex and LSD. He found himself in the punk-rock scene of the … Read the rest
Check out this podcast interview I did with Chris Bell for The Playlist.. We had a very intense discussion on films and Arab identity in America.
Author Jack Sargeant interviews me and writes about my 2003 film The Amateurs in Senses of Cinema.
American Arab: Why is being an Arab suddenly the opposite of being a decent man? Click here to listen.
