Usama Alshaibi

Baghdad, Iowa is the mask, the shadow and the night stars that sing the sorrow song of death. You might be dreaming, so don't wake up until you arrive.

An adventure in pornographic surrealism.

A young Muslim Dominatrix in the midst of a spiritual crisis.

Formally, an intriguing depiction of video as forward motion, or as technology of road movies and dreams. Alshaibi intercuts footage of a Southeastern Asian trip with a young man’s venereal disease-influenced fantasies of a strange young woman.

What is preventing these people from completing video penetration?

A short film by Usama Alshaibi

Close-up of a woman crying.

Ass is a vivisection that attacks the optic nerves and creates a conflict within the body.

A woman is chased across a field by an unseen assailant.

Study of a schizophrenic girl in her own language.

A young artist in a dark dorm room takes anxieties out of their brain and into their hands.

A woman lying on a hardwood floor covered in plastic wrap.

Usama Alshaibi-directed short film.

An eerily stylized deconstruction of exploitation and violence in life and cinema.

Super 8 video shot by Alshaibi's brother in Samarra.

Muhammad Zeromski, raised in Iraq and Poland, returns to the U.S. after being away for almost a year. The climate he enters is ominous and confused. He meets a woman who calls herself Jane Doe. They share a common fear and are drawn to one another through their paranoia.

A bandaged woman writhes naked on a bed.

Rhythm and repetition plays an important role in the animated film Allahu Akbar by Usama Alshaibi. With this film, Alshaibi questions the confrontation between tradition and modernity by drawing inspiration from geometric motives of Islamic art. The artist offers a re-interpretation of these motifs through computer animation. By turning the shapes in different direction, new images are generated, freeing them from their fixed state. Traditional spiritual values feed the present and open up to a modern perspective.

A road trip to a Ziggurat in Colorado sparks connection between Arabs in the state. Filmmaker, Usama Alshaibi, embarks on a journey to the Crestone Ziggurat. His personal pilgrimage intertwines with the stories of other Arabs in Boulder who find ways of bringing their homelands to the state.

A devotion to beauty, aching and isolation.

A psychedelic portrait of the founding theorist of Christianity, Paul the Apostle. His life, ideology and influence are reconstructed by piecing together 16mm footage, cassettes, animation, and Catholic liturgical music.

Iraqi-American filmmaker Usama Alshaibi shares his own story of experiencing racism in post-9/11 America. Showcasing the diversity of Arabs living in the United States, "American Arab" sparks a frank conversation about identity and perception, and argues for giving people "the space to be complicated."

This video is compiled from several appropriated clips from VCD's(Video Compact Discs) that are sold in Baghdad.Iraqi-American filmmaker Usama Alshaibi...makes some striking juxtapositions with his work "Bombshell: Iraqi Secret Videos and Artifacts from a Fallen Regime," which split-screens a smiling Saddam Hussein birthday party and underground torture videos as well as images of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Hussein in 1983. "'Bombshell' is saying many things at once," explains Alshaibi, who lived in Iraq as a child and just recently visited his homeland. "I'm just showing the history of Iraq: the U.S. intervention, but also keep in mind that Saddam was the United States' main guy, we helped him produce chemical weapons, so it's the schizophrenia of war and Iraq as a symbol of many things."