Dream with You is a visual poem accompanying a short story written by my sister. To make the video, I filmed my mom and sister on one of my visits back home and asked my cousin to do the voice-over. It was important for me to have it be a family effort.

About the filmmaker: Sara Gamaleldin is an experimental video artist from Cairo, Egypt currently based in New York City. Her work explores her relationship to home since moving to the US. She is interested in the ways to visually represent feelings of longing and nostalgia, particularly relating to familial relationships. 

Grinding away at the inherited family business, Mohamed works tirelessly making sales of knock-off perfume while living as a knock-off version of his true self. Grappling with the recent loss of his father, his mother's anxious attempts to get him married and the shadow of his hidden Queer identity, Mohamed finds solace and connection in a day spent with a beautiful stranger who lives in self-acceptance and sees Mohamed for who he truly is under the many layers of polo-sport adjacent cologne.

About the filmmaker: Fateema Al-Hamaydeh Miller is an award-winning queer mixed-race Palestinian writer & director whose work explores themes of fragmented identity, grief & post-traumatic growth through "oh no, should I laugh?" comedy. Her work has screened at festivals worldwide, including OutFest LA, NewFest NYC, Leeds Queer Film Festival & the Reel Asian International Film Festival. She is a Women in the Director’s Chair, Canadian Film Centre Norman Jewison Directors’ Lab & University of Southern California Middle Eastern Media Initiative alumni. Fateema believes in resilience & resistance through laughter & embraces comedy to explore the pains & joys of being human.

WOMEN is choreographed by Nicole Bindler in collaboration with three dancers from Diyar Theater, Dima Awad, Christy Daboub, Hala Abusaada, and the company Director, Rami Khader. Hala's role was later performed by Ghadeer Odeh. The piece is a hybrid dabke/contemporary dance that explores the parallels between the conquest of Palestinian land and Palestinian women's bodies. The dancers create a map of Palestine with stones on the stage and on the geography of their bodies. They perform quotidian tasks, such as braiding hair to the sounds of war outside their window. They dance to the music and the sounds of the streets in their hometown, Bethlehem. This piece is an ode to the women of Palestine told by three women who grieve the loss of their land and the sea they cannot visit. This piece is also a celebration of their vitality, resilience, and intelligence that resides not just in their minds, but in their skin, muscles, and bones.

About the filmmaker: Nicole Bindler–dance-maker, somatics practitioner, and writer–has been a part of the Palestine solidarity movement since 2001. From 2014-2017 she collaborated with Diyar Theatre, a Bethlehem-based performance company that brings to life Palestine’s rich history and culture through dance, movement, and theatre. These practices are important outlets for creative cultural resistance against oppression. Diyar is a place where young adults can celebrate their Palestinian heritage through traditional folk dance, contemporary dance, movement, and theatre in a space where creativity, imagination, and freedom of expression are celebrated as critical components of cultural and social development.

Miss Chelove: From Java to the Streets of D.C

Indonesian-American artist Cita Sadeli, a.k.a. MISS CHELOVE, begins work on a mural in a soon-to-open Indonesian coffeehouse in Washington, D.C. As she paints, Cita talks about her life in the DMV area, her cultural heritage, the influence of punk and hip-hop on her life, and how she came to fall in love with graffiti in the 1980’s when there were few women drawn to the art at the time.

About the filmmaker: Sara T. Gama is an Arab-American filmmaker whose narrative and documentary work explores issues of identity, culture clash, and the influence of music and subculture on people's lives. Before becoming a filmmaker Sara worked as a D.J. in the Washington D.C. Goth/Punk music scene and as an assistant manager at a local punk rock clothing boutique, it was a chance day as an extra on a local film shoot that set her on a path studying filmmaking. Sara has a B.A. and an M.A. in Film and Video Arts from American University in Washington D.C. and a Post-Graduate Diploma in 16 and 35mm Filmmaking from the London Film School. She is currently directing a music video for the D.C. Post-Punk band Strange Boutique, and a documentary short about MISS CHELOVE's mural in Blagden Alley D.C. that pays tribute to Bill Warrell, founder of the legendary club D.C. Space.

You Need Me is a meditation on power and identity. The work explores how the zionist state’s identity is contingent on formulating Palestinians as perpetual terror. Through contemplations on intimacy, sensuality, and kink layered across the landscape of my body, the work asks how the Palestinian body can subvert this power-relationship thrusted upon it, and by doing so redefine the identity of zionist state as fallacy and fantasy.

About the filmmaker: Mette Loulou von Kohl was born from the orange at the center before the new world came.  She is a performer and a wanderer. Mette Loulou is a queer femme, of Lebanese/Palestinian and Danish ancestry. She has lived in New York, Romania, Morocco, Denmark and England. Mette Loulou is fascinated by the intersection between her personal identities as a jumping off point to reveal, dismantle and rebuild realities and dreams. She grapples with her past to complicate and better understand her present. Mette Loulou weaves movement, words, and objects into the exploration of her embodied histories. She exists in two places at once.

A phone conversation sets the diasporic table as a disembodied figure prepares Qahwah Arabi / Arabic Coffee. Here, the contradictions inherent in Google Translate’s instant camera feature are made visible through glitched mistranslations. Using these flaws as a prompt, the communication between a mother and a daughter considers ambiguity as a source of embodied knowledge.

Throughout the past several decades, Afghan musicians have been releasing folk and pop music videos that have reached audiences both in Afghanistan and the diaspora. These videos exist as deteriorated relics throughout the internet, allowing viewers to see what the country’s future could hold by exploring its cultural production in past fifty years. Diasporistan pays homage to these music videos by bringing together language, stereotypes, and clichés with pixelated images. Featuring an unnamed character dressed in Afghan drag who navigates fragmented spaces, Diasporistan explores the ultimate exaggeration of female diasporic identity and serves as a satirical commentary on the state of the Afghan diaspora. The collage of urban, natural, and domestic environments creates a dreamlike landscape in which the past, present, and future converge to the tune of a looping rubab track. English and Farsi are intentionally left without translation in order to challenge viewers of varying backgrounds to engage with the work on multiple levels and reflect on the intersections of language and identity.

About the filmmaker: Shiraz Fazli is an Afghan artist born and based in Brooklyn, NY. Informed by the cultural history of Afghanistan, she creates paintings, dolls, and other textile works that reimagine Afghan motifs, language, and traditions. Fazli graduated from Bard College in 2019 and has exhibited in national and international galleries such as Gallerie Eingenheim, ACUD Art House, and ReflectSpace Gallery. In 2023, she exhibited at the Goethe Institute in Exile’s Afghanistan Festival, aligning her work with Afghan artists in diaspora. Fazli’s work pushes the limits of cultural norms and is imbued with a critique of displacement and foreign intervention.