Barzakh

Living in a dystopian future where the U.S. government is sending refugees and undocumented immigrants to a recently colonized Mars, a Syrian refugee misses her deportation launch and makes a musical connection with a local DJ.

Karina Adriana Dandashi is a Syrian-American writer, director, and actress living in Brooklyn, NY. She has worked under independent film companies such as A24 and Stay Gold Features. Her films aim to explore nuances in identity through the intersection of family, religion, and culture in Arab-American and Muslim communities. Her debut short film, Short Shorts, is a coming of age about an American Muslim teenage girl who uses clothes to inform identity between two cultures. Her second short, Barzakh, uses the Sci-Fi genre to reflect upon the sociopolitical divide in the United States and the treatment of Muslims, refugees, and undocumented immigrants. Karina is the 2021 Silver Sun Diverse Voices Filmmaker Fellow at the Jacob Burns Film Center, where she will be working on two narrative shorts about sexuality and colorism and two short docs that thematically accompany them.