The Muslim Meme and Baghdad, Iowa will play at the YallaPunk fest with City of Djinn. More info: YallaPunk is an annual gathering of Arab, Persian, MENA, etc. intersectional creatives. YallaPunk 2018 will take place in Philadelphia from August 31 – September 2, 2018.
https://www.facebook.com/yallapunk/
Muffin
I made this short movie over 18 years ago on a cold winter night in Chicago. I convinced a good friend to buy me a Sony 3-chip mini-digital video camera, in exchange to stay in my crappy apartment for free. Back then, especially coming out of film school, video was considered low-brow, cheap and crass. But I loved video and enjoyed the possibilities it gave me. I could finally grab a camera and do it all myself. This early short movie set the DNA of much of my later work. The interview style mixed within a narrative, the crass and the beautiful, the self conscious approach. It was also a kind of accident. An actor to play the male was supposed to show up and didn’t make it. I had a few notes scribbled on a piece of paper for what I wanted. It was more like a feeling with certain lines, certain images and moods, but nothing concrete. I had a friend I went to film school with and he was going to help me with lighting. Instead Piotr Tokarski ended up acting in my film and we started a productive relationship with him starring in many of my short films and feature films. The other performer is my friend Becka Joynt. I believe we met at the Goldstar Bar and we talked about doing something together. This was all shot in her apartment, and with some direction and some dark chaos all operating in a boozy haze.
You can see here I’m experimenting with audio, editing… but also trying to conjure a hypnotic state… it was shot in one night and edited overnight in the basement of Peter Hartel’s house. I was just learning to use this new technology, and sat there in the dark, working alone, and created something I was craving to see.
“Usama Alshaibi’s Muffin, an eerily stylized deconstruction of exploitation and violence in life and cinema.”
-Lisa Alspector, Critics Choice, Chicago Reader, Feb 11, 2000
screenings:
Chaos Network Production (Los Angeles 2000)
Undershorts Film Festival (Chicago 2000)
Chicago Underground Film Festival (2000)
Euro Underground Film Festival (2000)
Watch my short film The Flowering. Shot on Super 8mm film and a little bit of analog video. This film just premiered at the 25th Chicago Underground Film Festival.
Welcome to Baghdad, Iowa will have its Canadian premiere at the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival for the 90 seconds film program.
[NOTE: This is auto translated from the original review in Italian from horrorestremo.altervista.org]
Here is SOAK, the first work of the volcanic Iraqi director and artist Usama Alshaibi known, best known for the extreme anthology SOLAR ANUS CINEMA (with the exaggerated CONVULSION EXPULSION) and PROFANE, film of 2012, to date his latest film work. An abstract, confused and logical work that mixes memories, desires, fears and alienation, centering on the theme of sexually transmitted diseases and violence against women in order to fulfill their somewhat distorted sexual and mental desires.
We follow the vicissitudes of a boy traveling in Southeast Asia, probably in Thailand, who dreams of sexual encounters with fetish practices such as the suffocation of the occasional partner. After an encounter with a white prostitute, she ends up getting infected and then starts bleeding and losing pieces of penis. Then begins a journey halfway between spiritual research, the obsession with new sexual emotions, with always alive the desire to stifle the prostitute on duty, and finally in unhealthy desire of emasculation ……
Experimental work at the highest levels, where the director absorbs and draws heavily from places full of colors and costumes Thai, Vietnamese and Southeast Asia in general, including rituals and animal sacrifices, jungle and powerful vegetation, transsexuals and phosphorescent prostitutes, shady European characters and ambiguous female figures. Nothing is fully illustrated and violence is never shown completely, always braked and confused, like the mind of its protagonist, suffering from a repressed desire for gratuitous violence against women, lost in a delirious limbo. The finale does not illuminate the dark sides of this experimental film, leaving doubts about what is real and what has only been dreamed of. An alienating and magnetic work, perhaps too hermetic, where the unmistakable style of the Iraqi director will end up dragging us along, together with his little limpid protagonist, in a world without certain references and mental and physical agonies, daughters of the sexual fears of our unhappy age!
(by SubItaFrancescoVecchi)
My one minute short film Welcome to Baghdad, Iowa will be premiering at the Aurora Picture Show’s Extremely Shorts Film Festival Texas. Very happy to play there again!
My short film The Flowering will have its World Premiere at the 25th Chicago Underground Film Festival.
Starring Madeleine Ours and Daniel Peaslee, with original music written and composed by Micah Bezold, puppeteer and flower creature by Aimee Mayumi, and human creature by Emily Bayless.
Strepsata and I discuss the many issues with cultural appropriation. Is it ever okay to take from another culture that is not yours? We examine many examples like bellydancing, musician MIA, and movies such as The Party and Disco Dancer.
Mizna Arab Film Festival: Experimental Arab Film
January 6, 2018
This wintertime screening, curated by Andrea Shaker and Michelle Baroody and co-presented by Mizna and the Minnesota Museum of American Art, brings an exciting selection of experimental cinema by Arab American filmmakers to Cellular Cinema’s CAVE 2 (Cinematic Audio Visual Experimentation) Film Festival. The matinee features films from Usama Alshaibi, Basma Alsharif, Hisham Bizri, Ariana Hamidi, and Andrea Shaker
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 ’80s. He drew inspiration from the Beats. Kids teased him because of his name and ridiculed him as a foreigner; when he visited his family in Iraq, he was viewed as an outsider American — a misfit. Negotiating sexual liberation, drugs, punk and Islam hasn’t been exactly easy for him, or something he’s been inclined to talk about in the context of his Arab-American identity.