Baghdad, Iowa

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.

In Nice Bombs filmmaker Usama Alshaibi returns to Baghdad to reunite with his family after nearly 24 years. This documentary navigates through his unique relationship to an Iraq that is much different than the country of his childhood.

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

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

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.

An adventure in pornographic surrealism.

What is preventing these people from completing video penetration?

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

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.

A short film by Usama Alshaibi

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

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

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.

Close-up of a woman crying.

Study of a schizophrenic girl in her own language.