It has been seven years since demonstrators in downtown Cairo first cried out to demand the fall of the regime. The city was both background and witness to this event. It is a witness to the individual’s disappearance within a tsunami of crowds, and the capacity for memory seems to serve as a reel of film, capable of recording millions of hours in endless detail. The truth was timeless, embroiled in spontaneous chanting: “The people want to overthrow the regime.”   In the first moments of the January 25 Revolution in Egypt, no one was concerned with documenting what was going on,... more

  Sarjeila, a village in Syria’s Idleb governorate, Sarjeila died when its inhabitants abandoned it 1,300 years ago, leaving to posterity their solid stone dwellings, an olive press, and graves. Then suddenly, life returned with the arrival of new residents who fled war and death, to live like ghosts in houses abandoned centuries before.   The film follows the lives of three families who came to the village to build new homes there, and records their relationship with the place and how the place itself is changing. It is a journal of people forced a thousand years back into the past, their lives destroyed... more

  A year ago my head began to reject my hair, like those places in which I’ve lived, the countries that rejected me. Land after land, one place after another: Palestine, Syria, and now, Lebanon—those countries that have failed and have burdened me with their failure.   The Gulf War, the family’s constant sundering. Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Berlin: parts of myself scattered across all these places. My memory, riddled with holes. My present and my death.   In Umbilical Cord I assemble an archive of my family in Kuwait: my dead memory of family. I embark on a quest for the unknown part of... more

The revolution established a space for ingenuity that has astounded us, the Syrians, before even making its mark on the rest of the world, and we wonder,  where had all this talent in satire, art, and innovation been? The outburst of the uprising against oppression and tyranny brought on a surge of these remarkable, latent energies, the spontaneous and the organized, in a way never before seen in all of Syria’s years marked by repression and injustice. History relays similar experiences. This project aims to archive all the intellectual and artistic expressions in the age of revolution; it is writing, recording, and... more