Middle East

1+8 is a film about Turkey’s unique position between West and East and her relationship to her eight very distinct and diverse neighbors. 1+8 is filmed close up on border towns of Turkey with Greece, Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, Nakhchivan/Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq and Syria exploring what connects and separates the people on both sides. The film showcases through intimate portraits, personal accounts and cinematographic tropes, Turkey’s eight borderlands revealing the political and cultural dynamics of life on those frontiers.

Detail is indeed a detail. It is an excerpt from Mograbi’s feature film Avenge But One of My Two Eyes, where human conditions face military situations. This is a detail of the reality as lived by Palestinians and Israelis daily in Israel and the Occupied Territories. This “detail” is what makes life unbearable.

This title is only available on Radical Closure.

In this video, the artist tries to overcome the effects of distance, and reflects on geography represented in exile due to war, and on the psychological distance represented in each one’s approach to her womanhood. The video beautifully weaves personal images and audio recordings of a very intimate nature, binding the personal with the political.

We will live to see these things... is a documentary video in five parts about competing visions of an uncertain future. Shot in 2005/06 in Damascus, Syria, the work combines fiction and non-fiction. Each section of the piece--the chronicle of a building in downtown Damascus, an interview with a dissident intellectual, documentation of an equestrian event, the fever dream of a U.S.

In 1959, Jean Rouch directed the film La Pyramide Humaine. Situated between fiction and documentary, Rouch’s work presents his attempts to initiate a debate between two groups of students from the Ivory Coast, a white group and a Black group. A precursor to cinéma vérité, this often forgotten film served as the starting point of The Four Chambered Heart.

How I Love You is an exploration of sexuality among gay men in Lebanon. A couple and three individuals talk about their sex lives, about commitments and failures, about their relationships to their bodies, about their passions and love in a society where homosexuality is still punished by imprisonment. The video uses light to produce a white veil that obstructs seeing, hence rendering character identification almost impossible. Through this obstruction, the video locates itself within a specific social context. 

Fences Make Senses re-stages and interrogates international barriers and borders using the bodies of non-refugees. Through a series of rehearsals, Barber aims to have privileged bodies experience the themes, situations, and ideas that refugees frequently face. This video was produced in response to the great number of documentaries the artist witnessed that interviewed the unfortunate in their impoverished conditions. Kept in limbo and squalor for years, these refugees are casually disliked by their "host" country.

Skim Milk & Soft Wax explores Jewish identity from the point of view of the American filmmaker, who was raised to believe that Israel is the "land of milk and honey". However, the realities of her personal experiences of Israel collide with that Edenic image. Instead, the state of Israel is complex, shape shifting, and often disappointing. Therefore: skim milk — a substance of reduced nutritional value, but which still lives in the name of "milk". And wax, the stuff of religious offerings, which is always ready to change its shape.

The PSA Project No. 1-15 is a series of fifteen videos that speak out against the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the act of war.

A psychedelic portrait of the founding theorist of Christianity.

The story of Paul the Apostle’s life, ideology, and influence is told by piecing together 20th century 16mm and cassette propaganda, board games, animation, reenactments, Roman Empire doom metal and covers of Catholic liturgical music. The gentle Paul themes of flute, acoustic guitar, and mellotron contrast with the Demonic Roman Empire themes of electric guitar, drums and synth. Performance artist Linda Mary Montano and Usama Alshaibi portray Paul on his journey.

With a combination of Hollywood, European, and Israeli film; documentary; news coverage; and excerpts of 'live' footage shot in the West Bank and Gaza strip, Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal (Introduction to the End of an Argument) critiques representations of the Middle East, Arab culture, and the Palestinian people produced by the West. The video mimics the dominant media's forms of representation, subverting its methodology and construction.

Out of the mouths of rural boys, finding the incomparable Mulla Nasrudin in Afghanistan.

The interior was delusional like any visual psyche. The couches and plants, rugs and paintings were all in cahoots and up in arms over the cahootery. The explorers were under-qualified and cowardly.

Home Movies Gaza introduces us to the Gaza Strip as a mircrocosm for the failure of civilization. In an attempt to describe the everyday of a place that struggles for the most basic of human rights, this video claims a perspective from within the domestic spaces of a territory that is complicated, derelict, and altogether impossible to separate from its political identity.

"... Basma Alsharif’s Home Movies Gaza, a film that captures the impossibly politicized domestic sphere of the Gaza Strip, under the constant hum and buzz of overhead drones."

The film centers on the images of the Gulf War, which caused worldwide outrage in 1991. In the shots taken from projectiles homing in on their targets, bomb and reporter were identical, according to a theory put forward by the philosopher Klaus Theweleit. At the same time it was impossible to distinguish between the photographed and the (computer) simulated images. The loss of the 'genuine picture' means the eye no longer has a role as historical witness. It has been said that what was brought into play in the Gulf War was not new weaponry, but rather a new policy on images.

Ireland, October 20th 2007

The filmmaker returns to the city where he made the first video in the series and looks back at the events of the past six years.

Six Years Later is the eighth episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world’s hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.

ḤARAM is an essay film portraying the urgent contemporary situation at the Haram Al Sharif/ Noble Sanctuary in the Old City of Jerusalem reflecting on the growing Temple Mount Faithful movement whose goal is to build the Jewish Third Temple on this holy landscape and in turn to assert Jewish sovereignty over this holy Muslim site.

Director and Editor: Cynthia Madansky
Cinematographer: Michele Paradisi
With Nazmi Al Jubeh and Avital Itzhak
Sound Design: Binya Reches
Graphic Design: RRNR Studio

This piece investigates the possibilities and limits of writing a history of the Lebanese civil wars (1975-1991). The videos offer accounts of the fantastic situations that beset a number of individuals, though they do not document what happened. Rather, they explore what can be imagined, what can be said, what can be taken for granted, what can appear as rational, sayable, and thinkable about the wars.

With a combination of Hollywood, European, and Israeli film; documentary; news coverage; and excerpts of 'live' footage shot in the West Bank and Gaza strip, Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal (Introduction to the End of an Argument) critiques representations of the Middle East, Arab culture, and the Palestinian people produced by the West. The video mimics the dominant media's forms of representation, subverting its methodology and construction.

An oblique, albeit powerful documentary that examines the current conditions, politics, and economics of South Lebanon. The tape focuses on the social, intellectual, and popular resistance to the Israeli occupation, as well as conceptions of "the land" and culture, and the imperiled identities of the Lebanese people. Simultaneously, the tape self-consciously engages in a critique of the documentary genre and its traditions.

"How can the distinction between "man" and "machine" still be made given today's technology? In modern weapons technology the categories are on the move: intelligence is no longer limited to humans. In Eye/Machine II, Farocki has brought together visual material from both military and civilian sectors, showing machines operating intelligently and what it is they see when working on the basis of image processing programs. The traditional man-machine distinction becomes reduced to "eye/machine", where cameras are implanted into the machines as eyes.

The Earth Is Young takes as its starting point a series of interviews conducted with Young Earth Creationists, who find evidence of a six-day, six-thousand-year old creation in their reading of the fossil and geological record. The film frames these encounters with depictions of the slow and patient work of young paleontologists, and the strange, shimmering life in a drop of pond water, both of which point toward a world far older and more complex, if no less fantastic.

Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (English Version) is an experimental documentary about "The Western Hostage Crisis." The crisis refers to the abduction and detention of Westerners like Terry Anderson, and Terry Waite in Lebanon in the 80s and early 90s by "Islamic militants." This episode directly and indirectly consumed Lebanese, U.S., French, and British political and public life, and precipitated a number of high-profile political scandals like the Iran-Contra affair in the U.S.

Shot in a local Natural History Museum in northern Israel. 100 white doves fly around cabinets of stuffed birds and other animals. This is a symbol of a culture which is unwilling to let the past go, and lives so naturally with the dead. They stand in silence, but fully present, as we continue living.

Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.

In 1966, the Syrian government's Ministry of Endowments solicited plans for a building to replace a 14th-century Mamluk mosque in Martyr's Square in the center of Damascus. A young architect proposed a design for a 5-star hotel and new mosque. In 1971, his plans were scrapped. In 1982, a building began to be built. Hospital? Parking garage? Military housing? The project--now called the Basel al-Asad Center--has been the subject of much rumor and speculation. As of 2007, the building remains unfinished.