Synopsis: The video films three girls playfully taking pictures of one another.

Director’s Bio: Samer Barkawi graduated with a degree in business management from the University of Damascus in 1994. He has been mainly working in the production of television series and drama as producer and director. He has directed several short films including Nur (2003), The Poster (2003), Yousry Nasrallah (2005), Kalam Harim (Women's Talk, 2006), television series Bint al-Noor (Dubai, 2008), and Buq'et Daw' (Syria, 2008).

Synopsis: The video films the waist of a woman who ties blue, white and red scarves as she belly-dances to the Marseillaise.

Director’s Bio: Born in Moscow in 1977, Zoulikha Bouabdellah lives and works in Aubervilliers, France. Having grown up in Algiers, her family decided to leave Algeria for France in 1993 during the civil war. In 2002 she graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Cergy-Paris and has since been devoting herself to contemporary art. Her work deals with duality and imbalance of cultures, their bicultural fusion and their capacity to transcend borders.

© Zoulikha Bouabdellah – Courtesy la B.A.N.K, Paris

Synopsis: An attempt to solve the Arab-Israel conflict in eight minutes as three men gather in Paris to tackle all the political, economical and psychological issues surrounding the antagonism.

Director’s Bio: Mahmoud Hojeij is a video artist, filmmaker and writer born in Lebanon in 1975. He studied communication at the European Graduate School, Saas - Fee Wallis, Switzerland, and majored in media studies at the New School University, New York. Films include Wish You Were Here (2006), Memories of Ras Beirut (2006), Tell Me Something (2006), Sa Carapace (2006), Shameless Transmissions (2000), and Once (1998). He co-edited the following books on photography and video: Performing Images with Ziad Antar (2006), In-Pose with Diana Dilworth (2003), and Transit Visa with Akram Zaatari (2001).

By Hisham el-Zouki. Syria/Norway, Video, 2005, 8 minutes.

Synopsis: Taking the dirty laundry takes on new meanings in The Wash. Two immigrants in Norway, working as cleaners for a company entrusted to prepare the site for the visit of the U.S. president, are suddenly thrown into disarray when blood begins to drip from the U.S. flag hanging high on its mast. The Wash is crafted like a caustic allegorical fable about perceptions of the U.S., and leaves the viewer with an open-ended field of interpretation.

Director’s Bio: Born in Damascus, Hisham el-Zouki studied English Literature at the University of Damascus. He moved to Oslo, Norway, where in 1999, he completed his studies at The Film and Television Academy. He has directed several short films, including, Nostalgia (1998), The Door (1999), Ghetto (2000), Eternally Aliens (2002), and Just a City (2003). Eternally Aliens won first prize for short documentary at the Rotterdam Arab Film Festival in 2002. And Just a City won second prize for short documentary at the same festival in 2003.

Synopsis: Straight Stories is an ongoing work, about wanderings in ambiguous frontier zones where physical geography and the geography of the imagination become indistinguishable. In Straight Stories – Part 1,  on both sides of the border between Spain and Morocco, youngsters dream about life on the other side. Their ignorance and gullibility make the difference between dream and reality painfully clear. Whereas the Mediterranean used to be once a binding cultural realm, today it is a dividing line. Landscapes look similar, dreams of the prospective travellers as well, but migration between the first and third worlds is hampered by legal, social, cultural, and political complications.

Director’s Bio: Bouchra Khalili is a French-Moroccan video-artist working on the frontier of cinema and the visual arts. Her work deals with displacement, relationships between physical and imaginary geographies. They have screened at numerous international exhibitions, biennials, and festivals. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Cinémathèque de Tanger as well as the co-programmer.

Synopsis: On the eve of the demolition of a housing project in Saint-Denis, France, Moroccan-born filmmaker Kamal El Mahouti revisits the place where he lived from the age of six. His delicate, impressionistic document probes the graffiti-covered walls, broken windows and empty stairwells of a bleak apartment block to retrieve the memories of an immigrant family, its difficulties and its rituals.

Director’s Bio: Kamal El Mahouti is a French writer and director of Moroccan descent. He studied film at the University of Paris VIII, where he completed the 16mm short Il était une fois le 14 juillet 1945 (Once Upon a Time, the 14th of July 1945). In 2002 he directed Ma Maison perdue (My Lost Home); it was selected for screening at the Exodes de l’Écran Festival in Saint-Denis and the Biennale des Cinémas Arabes (Institut du Monde Arabe) in Paris.

Synopsis: Akosse Legba is a young woman from Togo who was victim of modern-day slavery. In a luxurious Parisian apartment, she recalls that painful past. In empty rooms, the sound of her voice recounting the circumstances of her travel to France and the suffering she endured. The fragile process of disenfranchisement was slow, focused on everyday objects. As the camera films these objects we discover the relationship between her domestic interiors and the two years of effective imprisonment. As the narrative flows, we meander back into the past and a small village in Togo.

Director’s Bio: Of French-Moroccan dual nationality, Brahim Fritah studied at the Superior School for Decorative Arts (ENSAD) in Paris. He directed Chronique d’un Balayeur (Chronicle of a Sweeper, 1999) and El Censo (2002). Fritah was selected to participate in the 6th edition of the Cannes film festival Residence for young directors.

Synopsis: Bruitage operates at the edge of movement and stillness, noise and silence, witnessing and remembering, creating its own time and space. The audio tracks, looped and laid down similar to background noise, also of Lebanon, have been retrieved from on-line sources or existing home video tracks, which are played and re-recorded on open microphones along with the ambient noise of the different rooms and surroundings of in San Francisco.

Director’s Bio: Brahim Fritah was born 1959 in Lebanon, he graduated from the Academie Libanaise Des Beaux Arts (ALBA) in 1984, earned his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1992. His work is almost exclusively interdisciplinary, has been exhibited, screened or broadcast in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York and Yerevan. He is one of the founding members of the San Francisco Armenian Film Festival.

Synopsis: Each day children trudge the muddied village paths to go to school, but as Step by Step makes painfully clear, their only real escape from crushing poverty is joining the army. A chilling and insightful portrait of how the Baath regime transformed generations of peasants into citizen-soldiers and sent the poor in droves to provincial cities as migrant laborers. This short film was Mohammad's graduation project at the VGIK film school and foretells his cinematic style and thematic obsession with the language of violence in society.

Director’s Bio: Born in Lattakiya in 1954, Oussama Mohammad graduated from the VGIK in  Moscow in 1979. Step by Step is his graduation film project. He returned to Syria and directed a short documentary for the General Organization for Cinema titled Al-Yaom Koll Yaom (Today Everyday, 1980). He worked as assistant director to Mohammad Malas on Ahlam al-Madina (Dreams of the City, 1983) and directed his first fiction feature Nujum al-Nahar (Stars in Broad Daylight) in 1988. The film was selected at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs and earned the Golden Olive at the Valencia Festival in the same year. His second feature Sunduq al-Dunya (Sacrifices, 2002) meant as an hommage to Andreï Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice, was selected for Cannes’s Un Certain Regard.

Synopsis: Reticent and introspective, the eponymous Waguih is a reformed Communist and a onetime political prisoner in the early years of the Egyptian Republic—his life unfolds in fractured conversations with his son (screenwriter Abdel-Messeeh), extended silence and quotidian images such as Waguih’s retirement party. You, Wagih evokes Chantal Akerman’s recurring theme of parental silence, a silence of personal history born of unarticulated trauma that results in children’s sense of disconnected culture and uprooted heritage. It is also an all-too-familiar story of diaspora: a rupture in the continuity of ancestral memory, a first-generation cultural estrangement between traditional and assimilated culture.

Synopsis: Two Bows follows two musicians who perform on the kamancheh, a two-bowed folk cousin of the violin, whose lives are radically different. Reza Derakhshani lives in Rome, he infuses the kamancheh with jazz and electronic rhythms. Bahram Berkidor, lives in Bandar Turkaman (in Iran), contemplates suicide because of the debilitating restrictions the regime has placed on his playing. Do Kamancheh mediates a conversation between modernity and tradition. It also, inevitably, touches on the complex issues of cultural identity confronting Iranians today.

Director’s Bio: Bahman Kiarostami was born in Tehran in 1978. He began working in film as assistant director, and made his first film Morteza Momayez: Father of Iranian Contemporary Graphic Design, in the same year. He has also worked with his father Abbas Kiarostami on several films, he made Tarh (The Project), the visual screenplay for Taste of Cherry in 1998, and worked as editor on Ten (2002). In 2001, Kiarostami completed Tabaki, an insightful portrait of professional mourners in Iran, and Noor, that examined baroque and gregorian music performed in Armenian churches in Iran. In 2002, he completed I Saw Shoosh and Leech. Next came Ziaret (Pilgrimage) and Do Kamancheh (Two Bows) in 2004, Koffar (Infidels) and Bagheh Irani (Persian Garden) in 2005, and Shabihkhani (Re-enactment) in 2006.

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Synopsis: A wedding party drives across a bridge honking loudly; roaming adolescents comment on people they encounter; two guards play cards while a third sips tea and watches a soap opera. This compilation of disparate scenes takes place on a stifling night in Cairo, all framed by an onscreen digital clock that marks the passage of time. It forms a brief meditation on the arbitrariness, fluidity and intensity of lived experience.

Director’s Bio: Egyptian filmmaker Nadine Khan graduated from the Higher Institute for Film in Cairo. She has worked as assistant director and producer with many Egyptian directors, including Yousry Nasrallah and Nabil Ayouch. Other short films and music videos she has directed include Heidi (2007), The Outsider (2006), Here and There (2003) and Dream On (2002).

Synopsis: The wall closes in and the sea recedes from view if not from memory as the filmmaker ponders the question of homeland from a variety of perspectives.

Director’s Bio: Sobhi al-Zobaidi, independent Palestinian filmmaker, artist and scholar. He made a number of award winning documentaries, short fiction, art videos and multi-media installations. He studied film production and cinema studies at NYU, and since 1998 he has been an active member of the new and independent film movement in the occupied Palestine. He taught film and media at Birzeit and Al-Quds universities, published reviews in both English and Arabic of Palestinian cinema, art and politics.

Synopsis: Filming and documenting the passageways between Egypt and Gaza is forbidden, since 2003, the artist decided to secretly document his own travels between Cairo and Rafah. Transit is made from these recordings. It reflects on the impossibility of movement for Palestinians, and transposes, in sharp contrast with what is conveyed in the media, a visual representation of the lived experience at these border crossings.

Director’s Bio: Born in Gaza in 1967, Taysir Batnji graduated from the Ecole de Beaux-Arts de Marseille, he has adopted a multidisciplinary approach to his work through painting, assembling of objects, installation, photography, video, and performance art. His artwork offers a distant conceptual observation of the political and historical events that have shaped his country as well as subjectivity in regards to their resulting impact on humanity. Emptiness, absence, disappearance, and uprooting are recurring notions in his work. Works include Une fenêtre en voyage (1999), Voyage impossible (2002), Départ (2003) Untitled (Sand Clock, 2007), Untitled (2007).

© Taysir Batniji – Courtesy La B.A.N.K, Paris

Synopsis: In this smartly crafted vignette, Basma Al-Sharif ponders the right of return for Palestinian refugees: the sound of clicking slides, together with extracts from a speech by nationalist leader Haidar Abdel-Shafi and a heart-wrenching song by Fairuz, frame still pictures of houses long abandoned, cities that have grown and changed in the absence of their original inhabitants, and a beautifully embroidered Palestinian gown.

Director’s Bio: Born in Kuwait of Palestinian origin, Basma Al-Sharif received her M.F.A. from the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with a concentration in photography, film and video. Her work deals with the problematics of diaspora, transience, displacement and nostalgia, incorporating the political turmoil in Palestine as it pertains to her own subjective experience.

Synopsis: Bissan, originally from Jerusalem and who has no-one left except her old grandmother, lives in an old house that used belonged to her ancestors, next to the graveyard where all her family members are buried. Walking inside the cemetery, she passes by  surrounding hills and heads towards an undetermined end.

Director’s Bio: Ammar el-Beik was born in Damascus, he worked at Studio Haig, an atelier that specializes in the repair of cameras for still photography and cinema. His first video, Boulevard al-Assad was produced in 2001, as the outcome of a workshop titled Transit Visa organized in Beirut. Short films include Uthuni Tastate‘ An Tasma‘ (My Ear Can See, 2001), Inahum Kanu Huna (They Were Here, 2001), ‘Indama Ulawwen Samakati (When I Color My Fish, 2002) co-directed with Hanadi el-‘Omari. In 2002 he directed his first long film, an experimental documentary titled Clakette (Clapper), and in 2006, he co-directed with Hala al-Aballah I Am the One who Carries Flowers to her Grave.

Synopsis: In 2007 Palestinians came out demonstrating against Israeli occupation dressed like native Americans. Rather than draw clear analogies, the artist saw fuzziness with boundaries unclear when history displaces memory and vise versa.

Director’s Bio: Sobhi al-Zobeidi, independent Palestinian filmmaker, artist and scholar. He made a number of award winning documentaries, short fiction, art videos and multi-media installations. He studied film production and cinema studies at NYU, and since 1998 he has been an active member of the new and independent film movement in the occupied Palestine. He taught film and media at Birzeit and Al-Quds universities, published reviews in both English and Arabic of Palestinian cinema, art and politics.

Synopsis: On a boat bringing aid to a besieged Beirut, a loudspeaker lauds the passengers for their courage in coming to the rescue of the afflicted. From under the rubble of destroyed buildings, relief workers pull the bodies of the dead. Moving between light and darkness, life and its extinction, bodies redraw the boundaries of other bodies, the smell of death cloaking all.

Director’s Bio: Maher Abi Samra was born in Beirut in 1965, he studied theatre at the Lebanese University, and majored in audiovisual studies at the Institut National de l’Image et du Son in Paris. He worked as a photographer for Lebanese newspapers and for Agence France Press and Reuters. He wrote and directed several documentaries, including Mariam (2006), Shatila Roundabout (2004), Women of Hezbollah (2000), and Building on the Waves (1995).

Synopsis: Retired, poor Ibrahim lives with his 20-year-old son in their shabby home. One night, his son is carried home bleeding from a bullet wound in his head after participatring in a political protest. His friends attempt to save him, with meagre meager means and primitive medical intervention. Ibrahim nurses his son as he hangs between life and death.

Director’s Bio: Born in Turkey in 1974, Emin Alper is a filmmaker, critic and scholar. He completed a degree in economics at Bogazici University, where he is now a Ph.D. candidate at the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History. Rifat is his second short film.

By Faysal Soysal. Iran/Turkey, 2006, 12 minutes.

Synopsis: In a harsh, elemental outback, a little girl crayons her dreams and sails paper boats on a brook with a doting boy, while her mother, cutting firewood with the other women, worries about fighting nearby. When shots ring out, the daughter’s consciousness seems to meld with the mother’s, but cold fact prevails in this fable of disenchantment.

Director’s Bio: Faysal Soysal was born in 1979 in Batman, Turkey. He has a master’s degree in cinema from Tehran Art University, where he studied cinema, and one in modern Turkish literature from Van Yüzüncü Yıl University, in Turkey. He has published a book of poetry in Turkish, and his poems and articles on film and literary criticism have appeared in several magazines.

Synopsis: The music of loss, the camera as flâneur, wandering the ruins of the present. A subdued lamentation, composed of traveling shots gliding down Beirut thoroughfares during and in the aftermath of the Israeli war in the summer of 2006. Clouds of media noise and martial worship, an arrow-shaped tear in salmon velour and the steady scrape of the bulldozer claw.Salhab layers sound and image like chips of a cairn, a fragile yet lapidary marker on the road to the Lebanese interior.

Director’s Bio: Ghassan Salhab was born in Dakar in 1958. He is a film director and screenwriter. He has directed three features. Ashbah Beyroot (Ghosts of Beirut, 1998) screened at the Festival des Trois Continents/Nantes and various international film festivals. Terra Incognita, released in 2002, was screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes. Atlal (The Last Man, 2006), his most recent feature, screened in the “Cinéastes du Présent” at the Locarno Film Festival and was included in the official competition of the Tribeca Film Festival. He has also directed a number of short films, including La Clé (The Key, 1986), L’Autre (The Other, 1989), Après la mort (After Death, 1991) and De la seduction (Of Seduction, co-directed with Nisreen Khodr in 1999), and the experimental videos Narcisse Perdu (2001), My Living Body, My Dead Body (2001) and La Rose de personne (2002).

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Synopsis: Shoot in the urgency of the July 2006 war led by Israel against Lebanon, these eight short videos present a fantastic ledger of how the average Lebanese negotiated their everyday during and right after the war. Compelling vignettes that give voice to a street-cleaner in the deserted Martyrs Square, residents from the south displaced and relocated to public schools, a volunteer rescue worker in the southern suburbs, parents and kin of martyrs during an informal memorial celebration, a man too eager to perform for television cameras carrying a flag; far from the bombastic frenzy of media broadcast, the tragedy of war is recorded with humility and simplicity

Director’s Bio: Rania Stephan graduated with a degree in Cinema Studies from Latrobe University in Melbourne, Australia and a graduate degree in Cinema Studies from Paris VIII University in France. Her career in film production has been long and diverse. She has worked as a sound engineer, camera, editor, first assistant and assistant director with renowned filmmakers including Simone Bitton (Citizen Bishara, The Wall) and Elia Suleiman (Divine Intervention). Short films include Tribe (1993), Attempt at Jealousy (1995), Baal and Death (1997), train-trains (where’s the track?) (1999), Arrest at Manara (2003), Wastelands (2005), Lebanon/War (2006), Smoke on the water, 7 X El Hermel (2007), Damage (2009).

Synopsis: Each section of this five-part documentary—from the chronicle of a building in downtown Damascus to an interview with a dissident intellectual to a portrait of a Qur’an school for girls—offers a different perspective on what might come to pass in Syria, where people live between the competing forces of a repressive regime, a growing conservative Islamic movement, and intense pressure from the United States. Ranging from the mundane to the fantastical, these disparate possibilities reveal the complexities and tensions in a country that has become the object of intense international scrutiny.

Director’s Bio:
Julia Meltzer is a media artist and the director of Clockshop, a nonprofit production company in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from Brown University and her M.F.A. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is a 2004 recipient of a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship and was a Fulbright Fellow in Damascus for 2005/6. In 2007 she received an Art Matters grant.
David Throne is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. He received an Art Matters grant in 2007 and a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship in 2004. He completed an interdisciplinary studio M.F.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2004. In spring 2006 David was a visiting artist at the Cooper Union in New York City. He collaborated with Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt and Katya Sander on the project 9 Scripts from a Nation at War for documenta 12.