Anhar Salem

A documentary shot in Medina, Saudi Arabia, where an illuminating narrator leads a journey through the city’s neighborhoods, landmarks, and iconic features.

Tag Me if You Can combines found footage of daily expressions on social media, blurring the distinction between private and public spaces. These sequences are accompanied by a selection of mainstream commercials that star Saudis, rather than people from abroad, owing to the rising popularity - or what the artist calls "the new media revolution" - of home videos, YouTube shows, and vlogs. Through inlays and cut editing, Anhar Salem breaks the strict opposition between these two regimes of images, the first related to television and the second to individual expressions. Her red Zentai suit-clad performance recreate wedding rituals in the kingdom to a score that includes commercial jingles, matrimonial songs and K-Pop tunes sung by young Arab girls. By using Instagram's red filter, she presents different social media practices on an everyday scale while further masking the identities of the performers, creating, as it were, vacuums in the map of the internet.

Shot quickly in a break of film shooting

Fatima, in the beginning of her twenties. She cooks, takes care of her child and does her everyday house cleaning. Gradually, her life begins to change, she worked as a cleaner, her husband abused her, she asked for help, and then escaped away to live in a social house. After escaping with the hope of having a better life, she is suddenly faced by another problem related to the status of her child. The director was shooting with an iPhone since meeting Fatima to make a semi-fiction movie. But instead, Anhar kept the footage and continued shooting with her personal phone for documenting Fatima's new dramatic changes more closely, in the sake of keeping the same relationship and distance. At the same time, the film tries to emphasize Fatima’s emotional/occasional status throughout the film by using more vivid images connected to her situation, places, and old memories as an ex-dancer back in Algeria.

Anhar, her sister Ansam and friends attempt to explore the modern part of Al-Balad in Jeddah. Anhar Salem documents herself walking for the first time in her car-oriented city.

Mashallah. Why Did You Cross The Indian Ocean? features interviews with two pairs of Indo-Hadhrami mothers and daughters living in Jeddah.The women routinely gather in Salem’s mother’s living room – a site of informal commerce through which women from the artist’s community would buy and sell various ethnic goods, crafts and food. These conversations unravel in a playful manner wherein the women share a meal and recount their experiences of migrating to Jeddah – navigating a new culture and supporting the economic, emotional, and physical wellbeing of their families, while implementing and preserving their matrilineal values and traditions.

Two memories of mine narrated by my nephews, asking their mother (my older sister) if the images they recall are fake or real. Being raised up by my old sister and growing up in the same place, the film reflects how everything is related, revolving around the same experiences and memories.