Category: Blog

My first film for this year is titled Soon.

I was thinking about Super 8mm film and my own childhood and all these home movies my father shot and then transferred to a variety of video tapes and systems, and how those moving images mutate and glitch into its own form. The transformation is part of it, the memory, the pain and the history manifesting visually.

I was also thinking about living through war and how trauma is not something you have to suffer through alone, other people who have gone through difficult times can connect to this.

I keep returning to my experience as a child during war— I think I’m also recognizing what my daughter is going through with this pandemic and all the fear that goes with it.

If you are a curator or programmer and want to screen it please email or message me. I co-wrote this with writer and poet Lauren Elizabeth Samblanet , who really helped me shape my text.

I edited a new trailer for my 2002 first feature film Soak. My friend Tom had never performed in a film before but he wanted to help me. I always prefer to work with non-professionals actors, or people that have never acted before. It helps that my film crew is so tiny—in this film it was mostly me and the camera and the performer— that it allows for a certain tone to blossom. No deadline, no money, no worry. We were free.

It had only one public screening as a world premiere at the 2002 Chicago Underground Film Festival.

Film critic Ray Pride wrote this about the film:
“Formally, an intriguing depiction of video as forward motion, or as technology of road movies and dreams.” (Newcity, August 22, 2002)

Check it out and watch the whole film, it’s only 60 minutes.

As I reflect back I realize I don’t fully understand this life and reality. But I’m trying to let go of worry, let go of bitterness, let go of negative patterns, and to embrace wonder, kindness, laughter and compassion. I think there is something profound and also absurd about being human. I’m content with this beauty and chaos swirling in me. I used to think I needed so much, and I realize that I don’t need much, and I love being alone. But I am spending more time with my daughter—trying to spend more time in the forests and mountains, and more time listening to the whispers from the night and moon. I’m inspired. I also have someone in my life, a partner that I keep close to my heart and her love is everything. I feel revived through her.

Check out the Chicago Underground Film Festival trailer I directed with Usilia Warood and cinematography by Ben Hernstrom.

Rare polaroid (my mom found) of our house in Basra, Iraq after several bombings in 1982.

These are stories from my childhood about being lost in the night with my dad, the war in Iraq with my dog, and dropping acid.