Baghdad, Iowa

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.

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

What is preventing these people from completing video penetration?

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.

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

A devotion to beauty, aching and isolation.

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

Usama Alshaibi-directed short film.

Experimental short about the Qawliya gypsies in Iraq.

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.

A short film by Usama Alshaibi