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Middle East Studies

AWOL
Brigid Maher
2005, 20 min., Color, US/Iraq
Keisha Johnson, an African American soldier, goes AWOL in Iraq after she flees a violent incident. On her "walkabout" journey, she encounters children who decide to help her. Keisha and the children g...

Beyond Good and Evil
Chyng Sun & Miguel Picker
Producer: Chyng Sun & Miguel Picker
2003, 37 min., Color, US
We are taught from an early age that ”good triumphs over evil.” This video examines in detail how this rhetoric, in both the entertainment and the news media, perpetuates the negative impact of media ...

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 ...

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 ...

Her Israel
Marjan Tehrani
2004, 57 min., Color, Israel
A documentary that follows three women, a Jewish-Israeli, a Jewish-Ukranian and a Palestinian, through their daily lives in the bustling microcosm of TelAviv/Yafo. HER ISRAEL presents a much-needed hu...

Hiphopistan: Representing Locality in a Global City
Çiğdem Akbay
2007, 25 min., Color, Turkey
HIPHOPISTAN is a documentary film that examines the impact of Hip-Hop culture on Istanbul youth and reveals how young Turkish rappers, DJs, break-dancers, and graffiti artists creatively blend popular...

Home
Akram Zataari
1994, 33 min., Color, Lebanon
This series of shorts documents the lives of Beiruti women. "Make-up" (8 min) is a meditation on age, death and the cycle of life as a widow who lives overlooking the Bashoura Cemetery reflects on the...

I Love Hip Hop in Morocco
Joshua Asen & Jennifer Needleman
Producer: Rizz Productions, Inc.
2007, 80 min., Color, US/Morocco
This feature-length documentary follows the creation of Morocco's first-ever Hip-Hop festival, from inception all the way to the stage. Along the way we meet DJ Key, a self-taught turntable prodigy wh...

Jagadakeer: Between the Near and East
Tina M. Bastajian
2001, 19 min., Color, US
Jagadakeer is an Armenian word meaning fate, or literally, what is written on one's forehead. Memory, nostalgia, displacement, absence and reconnection are explored using the Armenian genocide as a po...

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...

Lest We Forget
Jason DaSilva
2003, 55 min., Color, US
Through critical lenses, this film explores a lesson that history has forgotten in a country that is alienating its citizens and violating their basic rights. During World War II it was Japanese-Amer...

The Momentary Enemy
Angel Velasco Shaw
Producer: Maria Christina Villaseñor
2008, 25 min., Color/BW, US/The Philippines
The Momentary Enemy takes a critical comparative look into the way mass media has represented the Philippine-American War, Vietnam and Iraq Wars since the turn of the century to present day. The video...

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...

Nazareth in August
Norman Cowie, Ahmed Damian & Dan Walworth
1986, 58 min., Color
Surrounded by settlements and the encroaching Jewish city of Nazareth Elite, the life of Nazareth's 55,000 Arabs remains a daily struggle. This documentary shows Palestinian Arabs living as Israeli ci...

NCZ Goes to War
Black Planet Productions
Producer: Black Planet Productions
1992, 30 min., Color, US
An examination of the Persian Gulf anti-war movement and its scant coverage in the mainstream media. NCZ went out in the streets and documented the response from activists, demonstrators, journalists ...

Not in My Garden
Nir Nader, et al
Producer: Video '48
2000, 50 min., Color, Palestine/Israel
In 1991, Israeli authorities attempted to evict the Arab residents of the Galilean village of Ramia, telling a district court that the land was needed in order to build homes for Jewish immigrants. Th...

The Other Town
Nefin Dinç
Producer: Hercules Millas, Nefin Dinç, Claudine Avetyan & Gamze Paker Mekik
2011, 45 min., Color, Greece/Turkey/US
Why do neighbors fight? Why do citizens of Greece and Turkey experience mutual dislike and distrust? Decades after the end of the Greco-Turkish War, the last armed conflict between Greece and Turkey, ...

Refuseniks
Sonja de Vries
2005, 55 min., Color, US/Israel
REFUSENIKS uses stunning archival footage, still photos and interviews to document the stories of Israeli men and women who refuse to serve in the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. In ...

Revolution Until Victory a.k.a. We Are the Palestinian People (Newrseel #65)
San Francisco Newsreel
45 min., BW, US
Filmed in Palestine by Newsreel, REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY shows the refugee camps of the Middle East, the rise of the Palestinian Liberation Movement and Israel's relation ship to the Western imperial...

This is Not Beirut/ There Was and There Was Not
Jayce Salloum
1994, 49 min., Color, Canada/China
A personal essay on the popular misrepresentation of Lebanon and Beirut which documents the filmmakers own experiences while working in Lebanon. Working with its own conceptual baggage, the video sit...

Three Tours
Betty Yu
Producer: Betty Yu
2016, 49 min., Color, US
"Nicole Goodwin, Ryan Holleran and Ramon Mejia are three U.S. military service members who deployed to Iraq after 9-11 to fight in the “Global War on Terrorism.” Nicole and Ramon served in Iraq during...

Tunisian Women: We Will Stand Up
Hajer Ben Nasr
2013, 56 min., Color, Tunisia
On December 18, 2010 Tunisians of all ages took the streets of Tunis to demand better living conditions and the end of President Ben Ali's repressive dictatorship, starting what would become the 2011 ...

untitled part 3b: (as if) beauty never ends…
Jayce Salloum
2006, 11 min., Color, Canada
In this video essay about dystopia in contemporary times, Jayce Salloum presents raw footage documenting the 1982 massacre of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon. Working directly, viscerall...

Up to the South (Talaeen a Junuub)
Jayce Salloum & Walid Ra'ad
1993, 60 min., Color, Canada/Lebanon
An oblique, albeit powerful experimental documentary which examines the politics and economics of South Lebanon against the backdrop of the Israeli occupation. This video focuses on the social, intell...

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...

With Blood
Juliana Fredman & Dan O'Reilly-Rowe
2006, 57 min., Color, US/Palestine
This documentary follows ordinary people’s efforts to overcome extraordinary obstacles in pursuit of routine health care in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Shot on location with patients and health work...


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