Category: Shows

My 1999 short film Dance Habibi Dance will be playing at 20 YEARS OF CUFF, a program to celebrate 20 years of the Chicago Underground Film Festival TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 – 8:00 PM and FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 – 8:00 PM at Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater.

Chicago Underground Film Festival is the longest running underground film festival in the world. Founded the same year as the now defunct NYUFF, it remains a vibrant & evolving home for radically dissenting filmmaking, and the defining example for underground film events all over the world. This program brings together legendary shorts from the festival’s first twenty years.

Click for more info.

I’ll be showing a 10 minute clip from American Arab at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Information below. 

Sun, May 19th at 5:00pm

NICE BOMBS SCREENING!

When: Monday APRIL 29, 2013 at 6:00pm

Where: University of Colorado, Boulder, ATLAS building, room 102

Please join me for a free screening of my 2006 documentary feature film Nice Bombs.

In early 2004, along with my American wife and Iraqi father, we drove into the most dangerous city in the world, my birth home Baghdad. This is a personal and diary like film. 10 years later, marking the anniversary of the war in Iraq, I would like to share my documentary and have an informal question and answer session with students, professors and anyone that is interested in attending.

This event is free and open to all University of Colorado students. Film students are especially encouraged to attend.

Nice Bombs has won several awards and had a theatrical release in Chicago and New York City in 2007. It’s broadcast premiere was on the Sundance Channel in 2008.

Thank you and hope to see you there!

Usama

For more information on Nice Bombs click here.

Click here to watch the trailer.

Death Jerk-Off 2000 will be playing on Saturday, March 9 · 3:00PM at The Logan Theatre as part of retrospective selected By Jack Sargeant.

“With the Cinema of Transgression manifesto, Nick Zedd affirmed the relationship between the post-punk underground film scene and transgression. Celebrating the potentialities of crossed boundaries, the manifesto lauded movies that broke rules and affirmed vital existence: ‘There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined. None shall emerge unscathed.’

Linking the underground and transgression in the popular imagination, Zedd’s manifesto reached far beyond the initial scene it described and influenced a whole generation of young filmmakers to follow their own visions and create their own movies, often regardless of the consequences. This program celebrates those filmmakers whose work engaged with transgression as a boundary-crossing affirmation of unconscious urges, directors who wanted nothing more than to poke greasy fingers deep into the fantasies, desires, and horrors that lurk just below the surface, directors who wanted to explore new forms of fetishistic sexual representation, and directors who just didn’t give a shit and wanted to outrage and shock as much as entertain and inform.” (JS)

Madball
Charles Pinion
16mm, 6 min., 1988, USA

This rarely seen short is an exercise in fun by the director best known for the features Red Spirit Lake and We Await.

Bovine Vendetta
Bob Judd
Video, 4 min., 1997, USA

Mixing together a cow and a cult leader to create a nightmarish babbling beast that has a special plan for the world.

Cheesecake
Huck Botko
Video, 7 min., 1998, USA

Audiences still watch in utter shock and disbelief anytime this – perhaps the best of Botko’s culinary movies – screens. Perhaps one of the most profoundly unsettling (and all the better for it) works made.

Death Jerk-off 2000
Usama Alshaibi
Video, 3 min., 2000, USA

A cut up exploration in film-kink and video-noise fetish for the children of the millennium.

Slow Death of a Large Animal
Mark Hejnar and T M Caldwell
Video, 6min., 2000, USA

Chicago-based filmmaker Hejnar has carved a unique cinematic reputation thanks to the depth of his unsettling visions and obsessive fascinations. Here he creates a work that echoes with an unsettling imminent darkness.

The Psychotic Odyssey of Richard Chase
Carey Burtt
16mm, 6min., 1999, USA

The true story of the killer, told in a unique fashion.

The Operation
Jacob Pander
Video, 13 min., 1995, USA

Shot on a borrowed infrared camera, the illuminated vagina and luminous penis of the two leads redefined the representation of sex in cinema. This deeply erotic short film offers a uniquely personal exploration of desire, sexuality, medical fetishism, and genuine love.

Meat Fucker
Shawn Durr
Video, 32 min., 1999, USA

A great, greasy, slop of meat sauce, gravy smothered flesh, pounds of meat, a few eggs, and forbidden desires all converge in this joyous celebration.

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT! GET THEE TO THE VOMITORIUM!

At the Brisbane Underground Film Festival.

A spun out journey through a selection of underground films and food, featuring some culinary mayhem from some of the nineties and noughties most entertaining underground filmmakers. From explorations of the audience’s gag reflex to brain expanding psychedelic fungus compounds, through conversational bovines and of course meat, meat, meat, glorious meat! A rare screening of some legendary extreme underground movies culled from the glorious underbelly of cinema.

Expect: chewing, swallowing, sucking, cannibalism, dolls, sexual mayhem and a giant naked Jesus.

With an introductory talk by Jack Sargeant

BAKED ALASKA
Dir: Huck Botko, 7:42 min, 1997

SPOILED
Dir: Usama Alshaibi, 5:50 min, 2008

THE PSYCHOTIC ODYSSEY OF RICHARD CHASE
Dir: Carey Burtt, 6:08 mins, 1999

BOVINE VENDETTA
Dir: Bob Judd, 3 min, 1998

MEAT FUCKER
Dir: Shawn Durr, 32 min, 1999

WE AWAIT
Dir: Charles Pinion, 55 min, 1996

As an author Jack Sargeant’s work has been described as “dangerously inspirational” by Six Degrees magazine. His numerous books on cinema include Deathtripping: The Extreme Underground, Naked Lens: Beat Cinema (like Deathtripping, now in its third English language edition) and Cinema Contra Cinema. He is co-editor with Chris Barber of No Focus: Punk on Film and with Stephanie Watson of Lost Highways: An Illustrated History of the Road Movie. In addition he has written on underground and cult film, sonic art, alternative music and subcultures for numerous books and anthologies including From The Arthouse To The Grindhouse and Underground USA, amongst others. Jack has written introductions for books by Lydia Lunch, Romain Slocombe, and Joe Coleman. The author of the acclaimed book on underground art Suture, he has also edited several volumes of true crime writing. He writes a regular column on underground film for FilmInk, and has written articles for The Wire, Xochi 23, Fortean Times, World Art, Real Time, Metro, Headpress and many other publications. He has recently completed essays for publication on William Burroughs and JG Ballard.

His writings have also appeared in the booklets accompanying numerous DVDs in the USA and UK, including the BFI release of Jeff Keen’s films and the Industrial Records Throbbing Gristle DVD box set.

Jack has frequently appeared as a documentary interviewee in films including Blank City, The Advocate For Fagdom and Llik Your Idols. He also appeared in Jon Hewitt’s hardboiled thrillerX released in 2011. He appears as a DVD extra on numerous films including the American release of the Burroughs influenced underground movie Decoder and the Australian release ofTwo Lane Blacktop.

His Forbidden Knowledge lectures on underground film and culture, beat culture, William Burroughs, decadent literature, sex and many other topics have enthralled audiences across
the world. Since mid-August he has co-curated Atrocity Exhibitions at Alaska Projects, Sydney, presented a ten-hour plus screening at the Underground Film Festival, Eire, presented a paper on William Burroughs at the European Beat Studies Network conference in Holland, and a Beat Film retrospective in Winnipeg, Canada.

Screens 9pm Friday 2 November

Antipodean Experimentalists, the Cinema of Transgression, From Eye Candy to Headfuckage retrospective, and Fucked Up Sex and Sexed up Psychedelia double bill.

Featuring films by the likes of Richard Kern, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Nick Zedd, Angelique Bosio, Soda_Jerk, Stefan Popescu, Katherine Berger, Charles Pinion, Usama Alshaibi, Tony Lawrence, Huck Botko, Aryan Kaganof, Cacaca, Carey Burtt, Samantha Sweeting, Bob Judd, Shawn Durr, Jeri Cain Rossi. OVER 18s only all day screening.Underground Cinema, Film Festival. Friday September 14 program curated by Jack Sargeant.

Screening GASH, ORGAN MOLLY and THE AMATEURS by Usama Alshaibi.

Click here for full schedule.

Jouyney to the Dark side will take place in the Dargan suite on Friday September 14thfrom 12pm onwards.

Jack Sargeant’s full day program is strictly for over 18’s only. If you are easily offended please do not attend.

I was commissioned by Detroit Public Television to direct and produce two segments for their new broadcast series Arab American Stories. The series is being broadcast nationally on various Public Television stations.

I interview café owner Frederique Boudouani who is bringing Algerian food and culture to Elkader, Iowa, the only town in American named after an Algerian Muslim war hero. I also interview Imam Taha Tawil who runs the oldest mosque in America in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Imam Taha is a friend  and we go way back since he used to tutor me in Arabic when I was younger and lived in Iowa.

Pictured below is Dinesh Das Sabu who was the cinematographer and Usama with Imam Taha at the Mother Mosque.

My Episodes are 2 and 7. Watch them here: http://www.arabamericanstories.org/the-stories/

Saturday, July 14 at the Detroit Underground Film Festival.