Usama Alshaibi

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

A collection of 190-second short films created in response to COVID-19, commissioned by filmmakers Usama Alshaibi and Adam Sekuler.

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

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

An adventure in pornographic surrealism.

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.

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.

Usama Alshaibi-directed short film.

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.

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

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 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.

Boy from War is an animated coming-of- age story of a young Arab American punk ricocheting between a war-torn Middle East and 1980s American Midwest. From LSD fueled encounters with Darth Vader and Saddam Hussein, to military pilots shot down into Iowa classrooms, Usama Alshaibi blends images and memories to give the audience a taste of what it was like living between two starkly different worlds, while never really fitting into either.

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

Usama Alshaibi-directed short film.

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.

Close-up of a woman crying.