The Parents' Room

Around the sleeping bodies, some presences occupy the architecture and move around the space in obscure activities: nothing of their actions is visible to us, except in the fragments in which the image shows itself under the flashlight. Monelle is a circular film without any narrative or hierarchy, without a beginning or an end, and it circumscribes a place of promiscuity and ambiguity between the different formats used—35mm and CGI animation—and the approaches of two opposites film attitudes—the structural cinema and the horror genre.

A family composed of three generations of women live in an old house in the neighborhood of Ñuñoa. On one hand, Leonor must decide her future, on the other hand, Monica must decide if she sells the house in which they have lived their entire lives while Emilia, must face her Alzheimer’s disease.

This film is an homage to the Gaza Strip and to the possibility of hope beyond hopelessness. Ouroboros, the symbol of the snake eating its tail, is both end and beginning: death as regeneration. A 74-minute experimental narrative film that turns the destruction of Gaza into a story of heartbreak, Ouroboros asks what it means to be human when humanity has failed. Taking the form of a love story, the film's central character is Diego Marcon, a man who embarks on a circular journey to shed his pain only to experience it, again and again. In the course of a single day, his travel fuses together Native American territories, the ancient Italian city of Matera, a castle in Brittany, and the ruins of the Gaza Strip into a single landscape.

An encounter between the kid and four characters represented by costume props: gloves, foulard, trousers, and pullover, and an encounter between the golden age of American animation and Italian opera.

The video is filmed in Medjugorjie, Bosnia, known for being place of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary and, nowadays, as an important destination of Catholic pilgrimage. Immersed into a stream of sound, pilgrims climb to the mountains, at the feet of statues. In front of these icons, they compose their thoughts in prayer; around them, slowly, it gets dark. In its cadence, Litania is a gradual fading to black of the frame.

Inside a woodshed illuminated by an autumn dawn, a young boy is yodeling. Traditionally employed in the Central Alps to call the cattle back to the barns or to communicate with distant villages, Fritz’s yodel is instead a muffled call and a lugubrious requiem, accompanied by other voices coming back from nearby valleys and mountains.

Video, CGI animation, color, sound, loop, 2018

Capital was shot at various locations including the CityLife residential complex in Milan, the Nile riverfront in Cairo, residential neighborhoods in Alexandria, and construction sites of new cities—places where architectural histories are romanticized even as they are being erased. Through these sites, al-Sharif explores the desires that drive politicians, urban planners, and their imagined ideal residents as well as how the resulting designs, with their disregard for the historical failures of colonial architecture, seek to transform and control the cultural and political landscape. Together the film and installation hint at the limits of free speech and reveal how the legacies of fascism live on in the present.

Cameraless animation, fabric ink, permanent ink and scratches on 16mm clear film leader, color, silent, 5 loops of 10" each, 2015 Five short animated pieces conceived as loops, in which the first frame overlaps with the last one. Five nodding-offs; five heads shown in the moment of falling asleep and waking up again. The films are made by painting directly onto 16mm clear leader with fabric and permanent ink, then scratched with engraving needles.