FAMILY PORTRAIT presents a compelling program of personal works by filmmakers who courageously turn the lens on their own families, revealing the resulting fractures that shape the fabric of their personal identities. Through these films, the filmmakers embark on a journey of excavation, unearthing their family histories and sharing intimate narratives that illuminate the interplay between individual stories and the broader cultural and political contexts in which they unfold.
Yto Barrada's Hand Me Downs combines blurry vintage amateur videos from private family albums from the 1960 to skillfully construct 16 myths of biographical identities that reflect the fractures of a changing colonial era.
A Radiograph of a Family by Firouzeh Khosrovani intimately explores the filmmaker's own family history in Iran, unraveling the complexities of her parents' lives against the backdrop of shifting political landscapes, from the Shah's regime to the Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. Through photographs, archive footage, and letters, she uncovers the fractures and transformations that rippled through her family, reflecting how Iranian cultural struggles between tradition and modernization fractured her family and personal identity.
In Echolocation by Nadia Shihab, distant and nearby voices merge to create a layered exploration of family memories. Through recorded voice messages and stacked photographs, Shihab constructs a poetic narrative that transcends time and space, reflecting on loss and change.
Together these filmmakers offer a portrait of their families, portraying how the broader sociopolitical context shaped their identities.
Echolocation, Nadia Shihab, USA, 2021, 8 min.
In Iraqi Turkish, English (no subtitles)
Echolocation is a film of voices distant and nearby: the rain in Oakland, my grandmother's home in Baghdad, my aunts' voices in What's App, my daughter learning to count to 10, my brother playing the darbuka, the cicadas in Texas, the walls of my studio. As fragments resonate and accumulate, spaces of loss are subsumed into new landscapes and forms.
About the filmmaker
Nadia Shihab is a filmmaker and artist whose work explores the personal, the relational, and the diasporic. Her feature documentary JADDOLAND was awarded five festival jury awards including the Independent Spirit "Truer than Fiction" Award. Her work has screened in venues internationally, including at Cinema du Réel, Images Festival, Walker Art Center, Berkeley Art Museum, Sursock Museum, Kassel Dokfest, DOXA, BlackStar, New Orleans Film Festival and Cairo International Film Festival, among others. Nadia was raised in west Texas by immigrant parents from Iraq and Yemen and worked as a community practitioner and affordable housing advocate in the San Francisco Bay Area for over a decade before earning her MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley. She is a Fulbright Scholar and is currently an Assistant Professor in Film in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.
- Year2021
- Runtime8 minutes
- LanguageEnglish, Turkish, Iraqi
- DirectorNadia Shihab
FAMILY PORTRAIT presents a compelling program of personal works by filmmakers who courageously turn the lens on their own families, revealing the resulting fractures that shape the fabric of their personal identities. Through these films, the filmmakers embark on a journey of excavation, unearthing their family histories and sharing intimate narratives that illuminate the interplay between individual stories and the broader cultural and political contexts in which they unfold.
Yto Barrada's Hand Me Downs combines blurry vintage amateur videos from private family albums from the 1960 to skillfully construct 16 myths of biographical identities that reflect the fractures of a changing colonial era.
A Radiograph of a Family by Firouzeh Khosrovani intimately explores the filmmaker's own family history in Iran, unraveling the complexities of her parents' lives against the backdrop of shifting political landscapes, from the Shah's regime to the Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. Through photographs, archive footage, and letters, she uncovers the fractures and transformations that rippled through her family, reflecting how Iranian cultural struggles between tradition and modernization fractured her family and personal identity.
In Echolocation by Nadia Shihab, distant and nearby voices merge to create a layered exploration of family memories. Through recorded voice messages and stacked photographs, Shihab constructs a poetic narrative that transcends time and space, reflecting on loss and change.
Together these filmmakers offer a portrait of their families, portraying how the broader sociopolitical context shaped their identities.
Echolocation, Nadia Shihab, USA, 2021, 8 min.
In Iraqi Turkish, English (no subtitles)
Echolocation is a film of voices distant and nearby: the rain in Oakland, my grandmother's home in Baghdad, my aunts' voices in What's App, my daughter learning to count to 10, my brother playing the darbuka, the cicadas in Texas, the walls of my studio. As fragments resonate and accumulate, spaces of loss are subsumed into new landscapes and forms.
About the filmmaker
Nadia Shihab is a filmmaker and artist whose work explores the personal, the relational, and the diasporic. Her feature documentary JADDOLAND was awarded five festival jury awards including the Independent Spirit "Truer than Fiction" Award. Her work has screened in venues internationally, including at Cinema du Réel, Images Festival, Walker Art Center, Berkeley Art Museum, Sursock Museum, Kassel Dokfest, DOXA, BlackStar, New Orleans Film Festival and Cairo International Film Festival, among others. Nadia was raised in west Texas by immigrant parents from Iraq and Yemen and worked as a community practitioner and affordable housing advocate in the San Francisco Bay Area for over a decade before earning her MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley. She is a Fulbright Scholar and is currently an Assistant Professor in Film in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.
- Year2021
- Runtime8 minutes
- LanguageEnglish, Turkish, Iraqi
- DirectorNadia Shihab