Category: News

I’m very honored that Profane was declared best movie for 2011 by Bad Lit. Thank you Mike Everleth! Check out Bad Lit a great site for all things underground film!

By Mike Everleth

Choosing Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film’s 2011 Movie of the Year came down to a near dead heat. There were two movies that came out this year filled with such grand ambition, artistry and skill that the decision almost came down to a tie before ultimately settling on the singular Movie of the Year tradition.

That movie this year is Usama Alshaibi‘s Profane, a spectacular triumph of uncompromising vision, extreme daring and intimate personal expression. There was simply no other film like it this year — underground or otherwise — and its only rival of sheer audacity of the past several years was last year’s Movie of the Year pick,Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then.

And yes, I did say there was almost a tie this year. The first runner-up is a film that achieved greatness for several different reasons than Profane‘s accomplishments.

But, before I get to that close runner-up, there’s even a third film that, in a weaker year, would have handily snagged the top spot:Jaimz Asmundson‘s magickal portrait of his father, The Magus.

Perhaps some might consider the adjective “dazzling” as too cliched and/or old-fashioned to use to describe a film, but it seems there’s hardly any other word to describe The Magus. This is a short film — a little over 10 minutes — with no dialogue that was originally reviewed at the very beginning of the year. However, Asmundson’s electric and beautifully crafted images of his father painting a doorway to another dimension were seared onto Bad Lit’s brain like a hot poker. In pure visual terms, this film weaves a potent spell.

The first runner-up to Bad Lit’s 2011 Movie of the Year is the powerhouse documentary Battle for Brooklyn, directed by Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky.

Made over the course of seven years, Battle for Brooklyn takes the story of a local neighborhood struggle and transforms it into a politically-charged, bare knuckle slugfest of epic proportions. Not only that, in the form of Daniel Goldstein, the film gives us the perfect everyman hero to root for at its center. To describe it another way, this is a ’70s Sidney Lumet film made real.

Even more astounding, finished and on the festival and theater circuit in the spring and summer, Battle for Brooklyn now seems like a prescient instigator of the Occupy Wall Street movement that sprouted up in the autumn. If there ever were a film to inspire the seemingly powerless masses to rise up and fight back against big business and the politicians who lie in bed with them, it would be Battle for Brooklyn.

Profane is an activist film, too, of a different sort. It is a spiritually activist film.

The main character of Profane may be a female Muslim sex worker searching to engineer a “reverse exorcism,” but one can tell that this is filmmaker Alshaibi’s — a middle-aged husband and father — most personal film to date. Perhaps even moreso than his diary documentary Nice Bombs.

It would seem that getting back in touch with his Iraqi roots in Nice Bombs have sent Alshaibi on a spiritual quest that has culminated in Profane, which combines several motifs found throughout all his work throughout his career, particularly his sexually transgressive experimental films and his explorations of the outsider.

All of this combines into a thrilling, heady and complex stew of visual provocations, challenging assumptions of American Muslim identity and oblique character development. It is the rare film that can so perfectly combine themes of political, social, spiritual and personal anxiety and upheaval into a cohesive, exhilarating whole. Perhaps none of done so with such artistic grace as Alshaibi has done with Profane.

It is for those reasons that we name Profane as Bad Lit’s 2011 Movie of the Year.

Slovenian blogger Total (no) subjective review of Solar Anus Cinema. Translated into English using Google translate. 

No, I’m sailing in the waters porn than you think to the title, but the art combined with the exploitation of the body. The title of this blog is derived from the collection of short films, between 2001 and 2008 recorded born in Iraq and staying versatile artist Chicago Usama Alshaibi . An artist who is one of the movie screen, but above all in the space of galleries and skvotov. It creates video installations that explore the issue of physicality and sexuality.If I’m looking for the easiest way into his bizarre perversion and obsession with the world, I can not far from the audio-visual treats Solar Anus Cinema (year 2009). Some time ago I had seen his short video Ass (year 2001), which is a collective of Cinema Abattoir placed on the collection of L’erotism (year 2007) and was surprised at the directness and impact strength seen. Manipulated the pictures women butt and your object of worship turned into zavijačeno, repetitive entity, which amends and consolidates the view of mind. Even then I thought that the line that separates pornography from art, extremely thin, the whole being becomes part of your personal taste. Attacks your taste. It also destroys the boundary between aesthetic beauty and aesthetics of ugliness. Usama Alshaibi is re-examines the position and your moral values ​​that this work such as you. In the compilation of the Solar Anus Cinema all items are namely celluloid debt by more than 3 minutes, which they do not offer enough room for choice. Naked female bodies in full force attack your senses and sense of wellbeing. If his films described as pornography, the viewer feel the satisfaction and joy. He felt the excitement and gratification of their primary instincts. A sonic attack in the opposite happens – dominated by disgust, discomfort, and all the spins on the border weaknesses. A hearing is not only your conscience but the whole body. I have long looked so natural cinema, which requires openness, sensitivity and tolerance. At stake are you – the viewer.

The easiest way to compare his work with the master of transgression – a New York legend by the name of Richard Kern . Master ditches and director of apostates and those who do not paint a perfect body, but by trying to destroy and distort. Usama Alshaibi work just that – a picture of naked models and cut them with scars, bandages, wounds and bruises from the blows. Do not celebrate violence – just the opposite. The body appears as a reaction to violence. As a result of something hidden view. His female portraits penetrate the essence of physicality and sexuality. Show women as objects in the universe of viewers and directors – even if they are single entities. Usama Alshaibi is just obsessed with the view that the physical addresses of highly visual fantasy. He is fascinated with the mere physical presence of their designs, which by itself does not touch – They penetrate the bare camera. And that is all you need to make figures from them. And although short films without any story or narrative. View is in itself explodes. Voyeur guilty conscience and leave the audience itself, which it seems as if it were part of the whole event. With such a force is directed to its subject / object closer to his eyes.

For example, take two of the short films. His best known work is probably Convulsion Expulsion (year 2004) which features his wife – a performer and artist Kristie Alshaibi .Feel like being from another planet or dimension, as it is shrouded in puffs and bandages.Androgynous creature, which comes alive at the time of explosion. Metaphorical and real.The director is capturing the moments when her menstrual blood (!!!), slides from all orifices.Contrast that is created between the whiteness of the body and blood redness, discomfort and stress has announced a full assault on your perception of the seen. Penetrate the invisible wall that separates the creator and the viewer. Good thing this is not part of the performance on stage, because otherwise the viewer would become part of the action. Or rather – you will not only withdrew his gaze, but the whole body. Another film that I touched it, the 5-minute eskapada Spoiled (year 2008), which shows the naughty young woman who nažira with sweets and fruit. But really nažira. Whole, this is not run only in the weakness, but reaches the full impact resistance. On the food I never looked like, as I have before viewing this film. I have a high threshold of tolerance. On behalf of the artist but art you can afford all – authorized and unauthorized. The choice remains a matter for your discretion. I will conclude with a smile on your face. Collection of Solar Anus Cinema is complete 50-minute mockumentarec The amateurs (year 2003), which proves thatUsama Alshaibi also addresses the longer formats, as already recorded a couple of documentaries. It is not without humor also demonstrated by The amateurs , which is a kind of fake porn movie. Or quasi-pornographic film recording. So much laughter in my house there was a long time, since the quasi-porn actors and actresses really amateurs who can not grow anything. Whole works like a dirty version of the legendary Czech Is this cartoon! No kidding. Everything they undertake, and even sex, it turns into a comedy confusions which prevail female half, men are far from mačotov – impotent, disinterested and adjacent igrarij. Another proof that what I watch, not pornography, but fine art farce.

I really enjoyed reading this review by Sargasso Sea, a creative collective blog:

If there’s one thing I’m sick of, it’s not caring. Perhaps not caring is the same as apathy or indifference or a side effect of being a teenager, but I’m not entirely sure. All I know is that too often I read a book or see a film and by the end of it, I find myself profoundly unaffected. As if nothing had ever happened, as if my viewpoint had emerged unaltered – and that’s when familiarity becomes truly contemptible.

On Friday night I sat in the audience at the Brisbane Underground Film Festival and watched a film that was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The experimental, psycho-sexual feature Profane, directed by Iraqi-American Usama Alshaibi, is an alarming snapshot of life that transcends the genre structures of drama, humour and horror. Muna, a young Muslim dominatrix uprooted from her Middle Eastern culture, loses her sense of spirituality and sets about finding it in the back of taxi cabs, dirty apartments and Chicago side streets. Although Muna’s trials with the Quran, hijab and her “jinn” (a good/bad demon) may be foreign to a Westernised audience; her sometimes psychotic, other times peaceful state of mind is surprisingly relatable.

The film is a raw documentation of her disenfranchised cultural identity, playing with the ironies of submission and sanctity – culminating in a haunting piece of cinema that did in fact make me care a great deal. At times, Profane descends into a kaleidoscopic swirl of colour, allowing the audience to tread carefully through Muna’s eerie and horrific spiritual dreamscape. In fact, it’s quite fitting to consider the Greek etymology of the word psychedelic: originating from psykhē (soul)and dêlos (manifest). The director Alshaibi does exactly that – manifesting the soul with a mind-altering perception that challenges our own sense of identity, rendering “this mundane world sublime“.

The genie Alshaibi

The Usama Alshaibi believes in genies. The Jinn are the demons of Islam. According to the Quran, Allah created man from clay, angels from light and jinn from smokeless fire. It is as good and evil, and said that everyone has one. Whoever loses the genie loses track of itself.Then estranged from the environment, culture and religion.  The Alshaibi finding the lost films of the genie.

Amerikanoirakinos filmmaker, was born in Baghdad in 1969 and shared his life in the U.S. and the Middle East.  The videos and films screened at many festivals around the world as a documentary about the bombing of Baghdad Nice Bombs.  Also, many hosted galleries photographic exhibitions.  His work is mainly in the documentary and experimental video and the style is basically influenced by the excess Cinema (Cinema of Transgression).

The life-like “collateral damage” in a NATO war.

Born in Baghdad but in a very early age his family moved to America when his father won a scholarship from the Iraqi government for the University of Iowa. The daily did not differ from that of his peers.  Celebrated Christmas and summers spent in the camps of indoctrination.He had not even heard the word Islam.

When he was in fourth grade studying his father’s ended and the family decided to return to Baghdad. From there they moved to Basra as his father was not a member of the Baath party and this meant that he could not find a job professor in the capital.  Basra found the war between Iran and Iraq. They had to go to Saudi Arabia again in search of the institution to teach his father. Their house in Basra was bombed nine months after their departure.

O Alshaibi has two sisters who were born in Iraq and two brothers born in Iowa.  The family emigrated when he found his father to teach. In Saudi Arabia, lived two years, then went to Jordan and from there to Abu Dhabi.  It was school student when his mother decided that she wants to study fashion and took the children back to America. His father, who could not find work in America, he stayed in Abu Dhabi. After a while they got divorced.

Since the war and the Middle East suddenly found a totally different environment where the notion of his classmates were girls. The student visa mother did not allow him to work.Necessarily made several odd jobs while traveling in Santa Fe, Madison and many other places in the U.S.. When in 1990 was 21 years old, the mother’s visa does not cover and had to return to Iraq.  In August, however, war broke out. He said he would not take part in this war (the Iraqi Army had recruit), and thus managed to get political asylum.

At that time he met the underground film movements in New York and more of the Cinema of the excess. In films of Richard Kern saw a kind of cinema that fit with its environment.Immediately impressed.

In 1994 he enrolled at the University of Chicago, Film Department. Paying tuition with loans and working as a guard in the same school. To 1995 got the green card and two years later he graduated from university. Got a job at the Historical Archive of Chicago. Furthermore, contacted filmmakers in Chicago with whom they shared common ideas about cinema. The Alshaibi had preferred to experimental cinema and most personal work of the director, influenced much of the Transcendental Cinema, despite the collective work of academic cinema.

The year 2000 was one of the founders of the Z Film Festival. As part of the festival met Kristie Drew, a young graduate of the School of Fine Arts and worked in a series of films and videos in the spirit of Richard Kern, ie naïve, full of sexual innuendo and sometimes violently, but with political references, which he characterizes “young erotic love letter.” The two became a couple and worked with many artistic projects, and always heretical underground.

The few years of normal life was interrupted by 9 / 11. The threatening phone calls and visits by the FBI (“whether you are preparing an attack against the United States?”) Became a nightmare.

His first feature film “Muhammad and Jane” is the story of an Arab and American couple living in fear of lynching.

The Alshaibi and Drew were married in 2003 and then acquired American citizenship.

In the documentary Nice Bombs became widely known. The couple Alshaibi and Drew taxidepse in Baghdad in 2004 and filmed the lives of the people who bombed the city, but also themselves in the chaos, destruction and moral dilemmas.

Follow the documentary Profane, the portrait of a dominatrix, “Master’s” sadomazochistikou sex Arab descent living in the U.S., while faithful Muslim. A great story of internal struggle with the Muslim devils, the genie. The two elements of art and natural life of Usama Alshaibi, namely the explosion of suppressed libido Cinema of transgression and the search for national identity among the Arab world and America combined in the portrait of Muna.

His new film has been working title “The American Arab” and will be released soon. Clearly the issue and why the turns: not yet found the genie.