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Collaging images of corporeality and text from Laura Shapiro's 2008 history of the American table, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, the discomfiting problem of undressed food is a film about hygine.
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An amalgam of two poems, goodnight takes its Urdu from a poem by a feminist Pakistani poet celebrating its speaker. The world is hers; it exists to please her eye. The English, taken from Kaveh Akbar's Do You Speak Persian?, dissimulates the author. Do you exist outside of the language of your people?
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A short film about consuming narratives, and narratives that consume. Inspired by a still from Afghan filmmaker Lida Abdul's work, White House (2005). super خوراک takes its name from a supermarket in a Toronto suburb with large Iranian and Korean diaspora, and explores intimacies formed in capitalism.
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میں کون ہوں luxuriates hallucinatory in feelings of anxiety, where words echo into new meanings, and the body, first the victim, becomes the perpetrator.
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Inspired by ابو لہب کی شادی, a poem by iconoclast Urdu-language poet, N M Rashid, links | سلاسل is a film about a futile hope. It brings the poem out of medieval Islamicate history to the social politics of contemporary Pakistani labor migration. Emigration is a dream and status-symbol for many, and emigration to the West is a far superior jewel to emigration to the Arabian Gulf states.
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A short film about buried cultural anxieties. Inspired by سمندر کی تہ میں, a poem by the pioneering free-verse Urdu-language poet, N M Rashid.
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In the lead up to the 2024 US presidential election cycle, as antagonism towards immigrants hardened in both major political parties, the US withdrew from Afghanistan. Afghans, some who had worked for the occupying forces, more who feared life under the new government for other reasons, attempted to board departing planes. Two men fell from an airborne jetliner. Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris, visiting Guatemala, admonished migrants, "Do not come!"
Shot on Washington DC's wharf, featuring Brooklyn-born Martìn Espada's poem, Floaters, snippets from the Canadian government's post 9-11 case against Adil Charkaoui, and a clip from Kamala Harris' speech in Guatemala, go away is a mourning of those who perish trying to scale the empire's walls. |