In the brisk, 43-minute anthology film, Cinema-19, a group of experimental filmmakers respond to the coronavirus pandemic with diverse and imaginative results. The films are all 190 seconds long and, say the curator/organizers, filmmakers Usama Alshaibi and Adam Sekuler, “do not attempt to summarize the pandemic, but instead focus on the personal, the political, the sensual, the distant, the abstract, and the absurd.” Read more
About halfway through AMERICAN ARAB, Marwan Kamel, a local Chicago musician of Syrian and Polish descent, sums up the knotty problem of carving out an identity in a country not fond of ambiguity, and offers this solution: “Give people the space to be complicated.” It’s something of a thesis for director Usama Alshaibi’s complex and extremely personal documentary. The core of the movie traces Alshaibi’s life through family photos and home movies as he bounces from Iraq to Iowa to Chicago, occasionally doubling back. In AMERICAN ARAB he examines how this sense of impermanence, coupled with ongoing issues of Islamophobia in pre- and post-9/11 America, can wreak havoc on one’s sense of self. Alshaibi wonders, “Why are Americans so clueless about Arabs?” before unleashing a cavalcade of archival idiocies from the campaign trail, cable news, and mindless Hollywood fare—thanks to Robert Zemeckis you can’t yell “Libyans!” in a crowded room without a bunch of thirty-somethings hitting the deck. Later, he (or some other brave soul) tests the water at a 2002 “flag rally” to predictable results, although one rarely gets measured commentary from someone literally waving a flag. All this amounts to a nasty reminder that Islamophobia is an especially insidious strain of bigotry; it often masquerades as patriotism or harmless yucks, but takes a toll on those attempting to straddle a precarious national divide. The latter part of AMERICAN ARAB delves into more personal territory: Alshaibi experiences firsthand matters only previously discussed, and we meet his wife Kristie as they start a family—the couple bonded over a love of experimental film, WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING enthusiasts take heart. With Alshaibi at its center, AMERICAN ARAB never becomes overly didactic and ultimately succeeds because the filmmaker himself is eminently likable and self-aware. While struggling to find a place where he belongs he openly acknowledges, “We tend to romanticize the places we aren’t at.” By allowing himself and his subjects space to be complicated, Alshaibi manages to thoughtfully examine this hard to define American identity. (2013, 60 min) JS (source: https://www.cinefile.info/)
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!
“There’s a cinematic mastery lying at the very core of Profane…”
“Kara portrays Muna masterfully by refusing to peel away the layers of her complex persona. Profane isn’t a film for the casual moviegoer, because it requires active listening and participation.”
“The original music by Ehsan Ghoreishi is haunting and deeply felt, while Alshaibi’s camera work is at times stunning in its intimacy and its heartbreak. While it may seem absurd to mention in a film with so much nudity (and there’s a lot!), Maha Moda deserves kudos for her costume design here. ”
A lot of what Alshaibi said in the film resonated with me as an Arab-American. He spoke about watching movies as a child that grossly misrepresented Arabs as mindless and sex-starved, and seeing violent Arabs come at Michael J. Fox’s character in the film Back to the Future. Many times, I was fed the same narratives as a student. In my Advanced Placement World History class, we were shown the film Not Without My Daughter, which was full of bigoted depictions of Muslims and Iranians in post-revolution Iran. It was cringe-worthy to sit through and to this day, the movie continues to remind me of how others may perceive me as an American Muslim: a threat. (read more)
In Usama Alshaibi’s autobiographical documentary, the director recalls watching the popular comedy/adventure “Back to The Future” (1985) in a movie theater in Iowa City. He recounts how the appearance, out of nowhere, of a gang of “Libyans” determined to kill Doc, the movie’s loveable mentor, forced him to confront his own divided and complicated identity. The event abruptly dislocated Alshaibi from his role as an American teenager (something he longed to be) into the Other – the caricatured, malevolent, and despised Arab.
Watching “Back to the Future” in movie theaters in Pittsburgh and Houston, this reviewer and her brother experienced similar reactions, coming to regard such moments as flash points for those both American and Arab, in whatever ways individuals choose to define themselves. As Alshaibi demonstrates in this personal film, these flash points have become more numerous, troubling, and dangerous for American Arabs/Arab Americans in the 14 years since 9/11.
The son of an Iraqi Muslim father and a Palestinian mother, Alshaibi immigrated to the United States as a child in the mid-1970s. Though he did not become a U.S. citizen until 2002, he is in many ways American – a lover of punk and metal music, a director of music videos, and the husband of a white Midwesterner. In his youth, he found solidarity with a group of American experimental filmmakers, musicians, and artists, and identifies himself as an atheist, who nonetheless feels respect for the “Mother Mosque” in Iowa City and its thoughtful imam.
When his mother encourages him to change his name from Usama as part of his new citizenship, Alshaibi – who can be quite humorous – says, “At least now people know how to pronounce it.” In response to being called a “camel jockey,” he juxtaposes the slur with a photo of him riding a camel in Iraq and remarks, “That sounds like it could be fun!” Alshaibi took the shot from his film “Nice Bombs” (2006), the story of his reunion with his family, including his father, who had returned to Iraq after he and Alshaibi’s mother divorced.
In “American Arab,” Alshaibi leads the viewer down a number of narrative paths, both joyful and sorrowful. The film begins with an emotional family visit to the grave of the director’s younger brother, Samer, who died of a heroin overdose at the age of 28. His mother tearfully asserts that this would not have happened in Iraq, and that it would have been less painful to lose her son in a war. Later in the film, Alshaibi connects with a family of recent Iraqi immigrants, particularly the young Wed, who bravely recounts the “bad things” about her life in a war zone – and then he admits that one of the most terrifying moments of his own life occurred when a bomb came close to destroying his grammar school shortly before his family left Iraq.
“American Arab” also incorporates and juxtaposes the stories of Amal Abusumayah and Marwan Kamel. In 2009, Abusumayah, an observant young American-born Muslim, not only confronted but sued a woman who ripped off her hijab in a suburban Chicago grocery store. A different kind of rebel – Kamel, an Iraqi-Polish punk musician associated with “taqwacore,” attempts to infuse both the Muslim/Arab identity and a musical genre with fresh meaning.
The film’s unexpected climax and denouement occur after Alshaibi and his wife, Kirstie, leave Chicago to settle in a seemingly idyllic small Iowa town, intent on having a child after Kirstie has suffered a miscarriage. The final scenes of “American Arab” encompass chilling violence, anguished self-examination, redemption, and renewed hope.
“American Arab does not attempt to provide a definitive statement about the Arab experience in America. That might make a fine documentary some day — and Alshaibi would be excellent at making it — but here he is more of the inquisitive artist, seeking some kind of answer to questions that seem to keep shifting with each major life event, from the death of his brother to a brutal hate crime assault in 2011 to the birth of his beautiful daughter, Muneera.”-By Mike Everlet Read more
American Arab is playing Sunday, April 6 at the Chicago Underground Film Festival and I’m in town promoting the film and getting ready for our big premiere. The film has been featured in the Chicago Reader, The Chicago Sun Time and the Chicago Tribune. Here are some links and quotes.
“It’s our responsibility to change the visual landscape. The people who are making these Hollywood films have a cartoonish conception of what a Puerto Rican is and what an Arab is. They put the simplest two-dimensional character on the screen, another movie copies it, and they become cookie cutters. We have to beat that down and mock it for what it is. Like, can you imagine if someone did blackface now? They would be laughed at. But at one point that was an acceptable form of entertainment. Hollywood uses brown-face now—Mexicans and Latin Americans are consistently used to play Arabs in Hollywood. Our responsibility is to get in there, talk about this stuff, and change what beauty is—and change what a leading character can be. What it means to be American needs to be reexamined.”