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Middle East Diaspora

Children of Fire
Mai Masri
1990, 50 min., Color, Palestine
This film offers a rare view of the Intifada as seen through the eyes of Palestinian children. At age five, Fadi is already throwing stones, while for Hana, 11, the Intifada is a new way of life which...

Cinema Fouad
Mohammed Soueid & Tele Liban
1994, 28 min., Color, Lebanon
A documentary on the life and ambitions of a young Lebanese trans woman, Khaled El Kurdi. The video follows her journey from soldier to cabaret dancer in an effort to raise funds for her sex change ...

Enemy Alien
Konrad Aderer
2011, 82 min., Color, US
ENEMY ALIEN is the gripping story of the fight to free Farouk Abdel-Muhti, a Palestinian-born human rights activist detained in a post-9/11 sweep of Muslim immigrants. Told through the eyes of the fil...

Forbidden to Wander
Susan Youssef
2003, 35 min., Color
FORBIDDEN TO WANDER chronicles the experiences of a young Arab American woman traveling on her own in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the summer of 2002. The film is a ...

I Call Myself Persian: Iranians in America
Tanaz Eshaghian & Sara Nodojoumi
2002, 27 min., Color, US
From the Iran hostage crisis of '79 to the WTC attacks, images of hostile Iranians and Middle Easterners have been well-ingrained in the American psyche, but no informed images come to mind representi...

I Exist: Voices from the Lesbian and Gay Middle Eastern Community in the US
Peter Barbosa & Garrett Lenoir
Producer: Peter Barbosa
2003, 56 min., Color, US
“I Exist” is a documentary exploring individual journeys of Lesbian and Gay people of Middle Eastern cultures living in the United States. The cultural and religious challenges that many Lesbian and ...

Just Ralph
Clifton Watson
Producer: Third World Newsreel
2005, 11 min., Color, US
An alternately serious and humorous "day in the life" of Ralph, a Palestinian-American grocery store owner, whose Brooklyn store is the neighborhood drop in center. As the 2004 election approached, Ra...

Kabul Kabul
Sedika Mojadidi
2000, 46 min., Color, US/Afghanistan
KABUL KABUL documents the filmmaker's journey back to Afghanistan after a 23 year absence. She recounts her struggle to reconcile the different levels of loss that many like her have experienced fro...

Mouth Harp in Minor Key: Hamid Naficy In/On Exile
Maryam Sepehri
Producer: Maryam Sepehri
2017, 61 min., Color, US/Iran
For Iranian scholar Hamid Naficy, exile is like an elevator that runs between “two cultural poles, two memories, two lives.” Naficy belongs to the Iranian generation that lived through the modernizati...

Najeeb: A Persian Girl in America
Tanaz Eshaghian
2000, 26 min., Color, US
After the Iranian Revolution took place in 1979, after which 80,000 Persian Jews fled the country. Since then, thousands of young women have grown up in Iranian homes in the United States, where they...

Noble Sacrifice
Vatche Boulghourjian
Producer: Rebus Film Production
2002, 39 min., Color, Lebanon
NOBLE SACRIFICE explores the nexus between mourning and militancy as expressed in the annual Shiite observance of Ashura. Participants in the procession engage in self-flagellation, bloodletting and o...

An Opera of the World
Manthia Diawara
2018, 70 min., Color
Manthia Diawara’s film is based on the African opera Bintou Were, a Sahel Opera, which recounts an eternal migration drama. The Bintou Were opera, filmed on location in Bamako, in 2007, serves as a mi...

Saj: Muslim in America
Sam Pollard
Producer: Third World Newsreel
2005, 4 min., Color, US
Sajda Abdul-Rahim, a college student living in New York City, talks about her religious upbringing as a Muslim and her quest for a less traditional and more personal spiritual connection with God. Par...

Two Months to Home
Janice Ahn
2006, 8 min., Color, US
In the months prior to 9-11, an Afghan woman named Samira Rahman narrowly escapes from the Taliban, losing her family. After settling down in Long Island and beginning a new family, Samira is taken aw...

Waiting for Mercy: The Case against Mohammed Hossain and Yassin Aref
Ellie Bernstein
Producer: Tony Grocki
2009, 68 min., Color, US
Were these two Muslim men who had no prior criminal history set-up to appear as criminals or were they possible terrorists? This documentary tells the story of a fictitious FBI plot in Albany New...

The Way North: Maghrebi Women in Marseille
Shara K. Lange
2008, 60 min., Color, France
"I thought that in France life would be easier—it’s the land of liberty. But it wasn’t like that at all." --Fatima Rhazi From Marseille come the stories of North African women making new lives for ...

A Week with Azar
Tara Najd Ahmadi
Producer: Jurij Meden and Tara Najd Ahmadi
2018, 11 min., Color, US
A Week with Azar is a short experimental documentary film, based on a true story of Azar, an Iranian computer engineer living in the United States, who in the winter of 2017 failed to see her ill sist...

Who Gives Kisses Freely From Her Lips
Simin Farkhondeh
2009, 41 min., Color, US/Iran
Inspired by the work of Sara Gomez and Cuban Imperfect Cinema, Who Gives Kisses Freely From Her Lips, weaves together fiction and documentary to tell the story of a filmmaker determined to make a film...

Zulaikha
Sedika Mojadidi
Producer: Third World Newsreel
2002, 12 min., Color, US
An experimental portrait of an Afghan woman in Los Angeles in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center and the war in Afghanistan. Exploring the relationships between image and voice, trauma ...


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