Category: Reviews

Published November 25, 2013 in The National, Abu-Dhabi, By David D’Arcy

American Arab is full of troubling images. None more so than close-ups of Usama Alshaibi with bloody bruises on his face. Alshaibi had stumbled into a house in Fairfield, Iowa, the mid-western town where he lived in 2010, thinking that he’d been invited to a party inside. For some young men there, it wasn’t so much that he was an intruder, but that the man named Usama was an Arab. The attackers were never prosecuted. It would have been Alshaibi’s word against theirs.

Alshaibi’s new film made its world premiere on Friday at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), which runs until December 1. The director, now 44, narrates the story of his family’s rough landing in America from Iraq. Usama’s mother is Palestinian, his father Iraqi. He and his siblings, one of whom was born in the US, grew up speaking English.

The independent film, budgeted at US$200,000 (Dh734,000), is anything but an anti-American screed. Alshaibi and his US-born younger brother loved breakdancing and baseball. He and his sisters, born in Baghdad, chose to become US citizens and they all live there. But ignorance about the Middle East after the 9/11 attacks and a general resentment towards Islam made it a challenge to be an Arab there, said Alshaibi, whose younger brother died of a drug overdose. “He never found his way,” the director said.

“Especially when you come from war, the thinking is that you bring your children here to be safe, because they’re not in war any more. It’s not something that you expect, that your child will get into drugs and trouble. It’s part of what can happen in a country where you can do everything that you want,” he noted.

In the documentary, three girls whose family recently fled Iraq tell of being stigmatised whenever Osama bin Laden is mentioned, although they barely know who he was. A punk rocker from the band Al-Thawra, Marwan Kamel, ignores prejudice, yet his tearful Polish mother (his father is Syrian) talks of her fears when the phone rang with threats to her family. A Palestinian woman, Amal Abusumayah, recalls an angry American trying to remove her hijab at a supermarket. She took the case to court as a hate crime, and won.

For Alshaibi, the name Usama was an instant epithet after 9/11. “On September 12, I received an anonymous email that said: ‘The only good Arab is a dead Arab.’ You look out the window when you get something like that. You have an anxiety about yourself and what’s going to happen to you and your family.”

Taking another name was out of the question. “Asian people would do it and Persian people would do it. Even in Chicago, at a place where I went for coffee in the morning, the guy who ran it was an Arab and he wouldn’t even call me Usama. He called me ‘Sam’. Here was an Arab self-censoring.”

“There’s been a lot of pressure to change my name after 9/11, but I hold on to it. I refuse to surrender it,” he said. “Life could be easier.”

Life indeed could be easier, Alshaibi learnt on a trip home to Iraq after the outbreak of the second Gulf War. He documented that journey in the film Nice Bombs (2006). Relatives in Baghdad welcomed him warmly, speaking English for the camera to the young man and his American wife. Early in the US occupation, their feelings were already turning against US soldiers, whose common view of the Iraqis in the film was that “we brought them freedom, but they don’t understand it”. The young couple returned to the US – confused, but eager to escape the constant gunfire.

“I couldn’t have made American Arab without making Nice Bombs first,” Alshaibi noted.

Nice Bombs brought him to the attention of Kartemquin Films, the Chicago producers of the now-classic documentary, Hoop Dreams (1994), which followed two African-American teenagers for five years in their pursuit of basketball stardom. Both young men fell far short of those dreams, but the film became a huge success.

Besides American Arab, Kartenquin also produced The Trials of Muhammad Ali, which willl be screened at IDFA in Amsterdam. This is a documentary set in the racially tense 1960s about the boxer’s conversion to Islam and refusal to serve in the Vietnam War. At the time, the name Muhammad stigmatised the heavyweight champion.

The rather disturbing American Arab points to a happier sequel, with Usama Alshaibi and his wife naming their newborn daughter Muneera, which means bright or shining, towards the film’s end.

source: http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/film/american-arab-at-the-international-documentary-festival

BY ANTHONY KAUFMAN

From documentary powerhouse Kartemquin Films comes the news that Usama Alshaibi’s new documentary “American Arab” is nearing completion, readying for festival screenings in late 2013 and 2014, which could mean a Toronto premiere or a fall regional fest appearance. I got to know Alshaibi’s work when I profiled him for the Creative Capital Foundation a few years back. His 2006 doc “Nice Bombs” offered a refreshing new perspective on Iraq War, allowing Westerners to sympathize with an Arab perspective in a much deeper way. “American Arab” promises to do the same.

In March 2011, Alshaibi was beaten, he alleged, in a hate-crime attack.

According to Kartemquin’s website, the new film will be another personal doc in which Alshaibi “will share his own story and introduce us to others, sparking a frank conversation about the identity of, and perceptions about, Arab-Americans. Seamlessly weaving historical footage, animation, as well as real-life scenes of people living as Arabs in the U.S., the film will put a human face on the vague complexities of racism in post-9/11 America.”

When I interviewed Alshaibi, who grew up in Iowa City, he offered a lighthearted take on the complex identity politics he faces on a daily basis.

“For years, I felt like an outsider,” he told me. “I didn’t know who I was. Not until Osama Bin Laden became so popular did everyone know my name.”

While Alshaibi frequently taps into the dark moments of his past—from the anxiety of living under Saddam Hussein to the fear of being deported back to Iraq—a number of his videos reflect a sense of humor about his living culture clash. His celebrated 1999 short, Dance Habibi Dance, for example, is a music-video-style Arabesque disco party that examines “how American pop culture is digested and interpreted in places like Africa, the Middle East, and Asia,” and vice versa: “seeing how Middle Eastern culture is interpreted on this side, and the humor in that.”

The bulk of Alshaibi’s work, though, provokes and confronts, from subversively pornographic shorts like Ass (2001),The Foreigner (2001), and The Amateurs (2003), to the disturbingly political Bombshell (2004), a video collage of Iraqi underground torture videos and Saddam Hussein birthday celebrations. His unsettling 2003 feature debut,Muhammed and Jane, is a haunting black-and-white love story about a fearful Iraqi-Polish man who returns to the U.S. and forges a relationship with a young woman suffering from a similar sense of paranoia.

In 2006, he told, “For so long, everything terrified me: I thought I’d be kidnapped by the Baathists and sent to war, or be assassinated, or deported, or locked up here. But I know how the law works. And I’m not afraid anymore.”

http://blogs.indiewire.com/anthony/american-arab-racism-in-the-post-9-11-age

Profane (2011, DVD Review)
by Greg Baty

Director: Usama Alshaibi
Cast: Manal Kara, Molly Plunk, Dejan Mircea
MVD Visual/ length: 78 minutes
Disk Extras: 20 minutes of extra footage
——————-

If you really understand religion on an intellectual level, you understand indoctrination. You know brainwashing and how the teachings and dogma go against every grain of human nature. One of those grains (more like a boulder) is sex and it is probably the most contentious of the beliefs held by most major religions. That is the postulation that sex is dirty and a sin if it is outside of “holy matrimony” or the like. Documentarian Usama Alshaibi (Nice Bombs and the upcoming American Arab) knows this all too well and has written and directed an art-house film in pseudo-documentary style to air his very angry grievances, Profane. Be warned; those easily offended by sacrilege and strong sexual content may want to stay in their prayer closets until this one is over.

The story follows Muna, a 20-something Muslim woman from Jordan who now resides in Chicago. She is a former prostitute who is now a dominatrix along with her compatriot Mary. The pair hang out, do drugs, degrade their submissives and contemplate life, in particular, religion. Muna has the inner struggle that every intelligent, free-thinking person who has been subjected to religious assimilation has. She wants to believe that the things she has been taught all of her life are just and true but she also wants the freedom to be a human being. To use her body the way she feels fit and to be in control of her life. She meets and sort of befriends Ali, a devout Muslim cab driver who tries to help her on her existential journey, but he doesn’t understand the turmoil and upheaval her belief system is in.

I am not one to seek out art-house films because, for the most part, I think they all teeter on the pretentious fulcrum. Affected “artists” making unwatchable menageries and hiding the flaws and holes with incomprehensible imagery. But there are artsy films, like those of Alejandro Jodorowsky, that are made by seriously talented artists who actually have something to say and have a vision they want to share. Yes, Profane has the seemingly nonsensical, psychedelic symbolism associated with art-house movies, but in the context of Usama Alshaibi’s thought provoking storytelling they just flow and on a subconscious level they make sense. The writer and director’s ability to convey his deep convictions not only shows his talent, but his courage as well. This film, apropos of its name, is sexually heretical and if one was so inclined, one may take it as blasphemous. And we know how well Muslims take disrespect.

How Alshaibi got first-time actress (and real-life atheist) Manal Kara, who plays “Muna”, to create such a realistic portrayal is a testimony to his and her talents. Kara also has some natural “talents” as well; she is absolutely stunning. Full lips, strong, gorgeous nose, a thick mane of hair and a real feminine body complete with curves. I wanted to sit with her character and talk about religion, sex and whatever else she wanted to wax philosophical about. She is a very engaging actress, playing an engaging character in an engaging film. Win, win and win. The other two leads, Molly Plunk (“Mary”) and Dejan Mircea (“Ali”), who are also rookie thespians, are also amazingly good in their roles  and deliver dialogue so believable, the lines almost seem ad-libbed. In fact, to make the whole thing more legitimate, the partakers in the S&M scenes are actual submissive sexual slaves in their “real” life.

The DVD that is currently out from MVD Visual has a 20 minute supplement that basically mashes together deleted scenes and behind the scenes footage from the making of Profane. The first three minutes of which is a scene of the ladies whipping a guys naked ass until it develops welts. Thank “god” he really doesn’t mind that, huh?

source: http://www.cinesploitation.com/profane-2011-dvd-review/

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.

This essay is by writer and film programmer Jack Sargeant. Here he discusses the novel Crash and its relationship to other artist including my films. The novel by J.G Ballard had a huge impact on me when I read it as a teenager.-Usama Alshaibi

Ballard And Trauma by Jack Sargeant

The following notes  formed the basis for a talk at the Erotics Conference that took place at Griffith University in Brisbane in February and more recently a public talk as part of the Decadent Society. At some point a more literary version may well be completed for publication, in the meantime, read on.

Profane

Like a bargain-basement version of Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, this Chicago-shot feature by Usama Alshaibi (Nice Bombs) uses a panoply of shock tactics—rapid editing, blurry superimpositions, drug use, and S-M—to evoke nauseous fascination with the sexual underworld. And like Noé, Alshaibi seems as curious about religious transcendence as degradation. The heroine, a Jordanian immigrant, works contentedly as a dominatrix but wants to reconnect with her Muslim roots; scenes of her lurid career alternate with a sweet subplot in which she befriends a religiously devout Middle Eastern cabdriver. Though certainly not for the squeamish, the movie is a striking story of life in the Arab diaspora, aided rather than undermined by its occasional narrative incoherence. 79 min. —Ben Sachs

In his still relatively young, yet incredibly prolific, career, Iraqi-American filmmaker Usama Alshaibi has mostly exhibited three very distinct and separate styles in his approach to his films.

There are the highly sensual and sexual portraits of women, such as Traumata, Gash and Organ Molly. There are the serious and personal documentaries, such as Nice Bombs and the still-in-production American Arab. And there are his gonzo, transgressive “comedies” such as The Amateurs and The Foreigner.

However, for his latest feature-length, fictional narrative film Profane, Alshaibi has melded all of those styles into a singular, cohesive vision that is, as of now, his most accomplished work.

Although Profane is a portrait of a young, female Muslim sex worker, Muna (Manal Kara), one can’t but help to feel that the film’s raw, naked emotional level comes from a highly autobiographical place. Muna is suffering through a crisis of spiritual identity. Having gone through a period of having exploited her cultural background for her career as first a prostitute then a dominatrix, then completely ignoring her identity, she is at a point where she is desperate to reconnect with that she has lost, but has conditioned herself to completely disregard the nature of her being.

In many ways, Muna is a cipher. As an audience, we don’t truly don’t get to understand who she truly is and what exactly motivates her. Normally, that might indicate a poorly-drawn and executed main character. But, instead, this absence of being draws us in closer to her. We become engrossed in her quest to discover herself and become frustrated when she throws up obstacles in her own path. The arm’s length that Alshaibi keeps us from Muna is the same distance that she keeps away from her own soul.

It’s a complex and bold performance by Kara. On an psychological level, Muna is vague and deflective. Although she mentions that her career as a dominatrix is empowering, as opposed to her former career as a submissive prostitute, her attitude towards the work is blase and just a means to make money so that she can live an evasive life with no attachments or responsibilities.

However, physically, Alshaibi makes Kara expose a lot. The film has several extended experimental sequences in which Kara is fully nude, much like Alshaibi’s short, sexual portraits, except now that sort of profiling is expanded to feature length. Plus, we get to see Muna at work several times, humiliating her mostly docile clients. For the most part there is no sex involved in Muna’s business, except for one fearsome and highly uncomfortable encounter with a self-loathing racist. Although, she claims her work empowers her, she doesn’t notice how her various degrees of undress and distressing situations is an exploitation of her physical nature.

Her work and lifestyle distances her through all of her human interactions. She does have an American boyfriend, but whenever he attempts to get close to her, she tries to humiliate him as well, through her words. She mocks his needs to connect with her emotionally and, in so many words, lets him know that he’s just there for the sex.

Muna spends most of her time with her best friend and domination partner Mary, who is played by the scene stealing Molly Plunk, the star of Alshaibi’s previous short film Organ Molly. Mary is a bold and brash woman, unafraid to speak her mind and act in the most erratic of manners at all times. Clearly, Mary is the sort of woman Muna imagines herself to be and is thus so drawn to her.

While Muna thinks of Mary as a friend — or at least a sympathetic compatriot — she is actually not an ally, but an antagonist, enabling Muna to indulge in her worst behavior, including drug and alcohol abuse. Mary creates the indelible impression that their profession, which includes sadistic acts of coprophilia, is the natural order of the world. While Alshaibi the writer/director refuses to pass judgement on these girls and explicitly lay out their relationship, one still gets the impression that without Mary’s enabling influence, it is possible that Muna could find the spiritual satisfaction she craves.

Muna’s real ally is Ali (Dejan Mircea), a Muslim taxi driver whom Muna and Mary begin treating as their personal chauffeur. At first, Ali appears to be an antagonist. He is drawn to Muna, whom he recognizes as a lost soul needing help. He asks deep, probing questions that, with Muslims usually presented as villains in American films, one has to at first question whether or not he has ulterior, sinister motives.

Muna tells both Mary and Ali that she has lost her jinn, a Muslim creature made of smokeless fire, i.e. a demon. At various points in the film, Muna hears the jinn speaking to her and, although, Alshaibi puts the sound of whispering on the soundtrack, it’s not clear if she is imagining the sound or if this being is truly speaking to her. But, the sound is comforting to Muna and she seems most at peace when she can hear it.

At first, Muna asks Ali for help in her spiritual quest and he’s all the more eager to offer it. Ali is also the only person in Muna’s world who doesn’t ask anything of her, on either a physical or a psychological level. He recognizes her hearing her jinn as a quest, not to bring her demon back into her, but to set her on a spiritually fulfilling path.

Ali does not judge Muna, although he is clearly sympathetic to her plight. He does not chastise her for not knowing the Quran or for not wearing a hijab in public. (As if only exposing her hair were the most private thing she exposes in the film.) Plus, Ali’s offer to help is on Muna’s terms. He seems to understand that being aggressive would only serve to push her further away.

Mary, of course, is verbally abusive to Ali, yelling at him every night that’s he’s cheating them by driving the long way around town. But, Ali is useful at least to have a driver and Muna seems to like him, so Mary does her best to tolerate his presence. And, while Ali attempts sporadically to provide a voice of reason, he knows that provoking Mary would also drive Muna away. In their verbal sparring, Mary and Ali represent an external vision of Muna’s internal battle.

Alshaibi brilliantly weaves together all of these conflicts and his own diverse filmmaking styles into a rich, complex work that is part horror movie, part psycho-sexual drama, part spiritual odyssey, part experimental vision and more. Profane is an extraordinary visionary work from an accomplished filmmaker who is clearly now at the top of his game.

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