Naim Naif

What we present to the world is a carefully curated version of reality. Girls Will Be is a powerful visual meditation on this topic, exploring the all too au courant themes of image obsession, social pressure, and shame. This "anti-fashion" fashion film eschews traditional narrative structure, instead presenting viewers with a dreamy tableau that viscerally juxtaposes the "perfect" images rampant on social media with the grotesque reality that often lurks beneath these lovely facades. In Girls Will Be, viewers get an uncomfortably firsthand close-up of the loss of innocence of a teen girl as her desire to be accepted by peers—and by extension society— makes her vulnerable to their perversely warped value system.

Coming Home follows Freedom Dabka Group - a collective of Palestinian-American dancers, living in Bay Ridge (Brooklyn) who use Dabka as a way to connect to their community and homeland. Shot on 16mm under the unique constraints of 2020-21 featuring archive photography from The Palestinian Museum.