The International Experimental Shorts Film Festival! Q&A with filmmaker to follow.

Home Movies Gaza – a 2013 short film by Palestinian filmmaker Basma Alsharif will screen as part of the 30^th annual Olympia Film Festival at Capitol Theater, Sunday, November 10, at 4 p.m.  The film is part of The International Experimental Shorts segment of the festival sponsored by the Rachel Corrie Foundation.  Seven short films with a total screening time of 74 min will be featured, followed by Q&A with filmmakers Basma Alshariff and Erick Lyle.

“…Basma Alsharif’s Home Movies Gaza, a film that captures the impossibly politicized domestic sphere of the Gaza Strip, under the constant hum and buzz of overhead drones.” — Omar Kholeif, Art Agenda, March 4th, 2013

Basma Alsharif was born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents in 1983. She is a visual artist using moving and still images, sound, and language to explore the anonymous individual in relation to political history and collective memory.  Since receiving an MFA from the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois – Chicago in 2007, she has worked between Cairo, Beirut, Sharjah, Amman, Gaza, and most recently Paris.  Her work operates between cinema and installation. Her work wavers between fiction and fantasy to experiment with non-linear narratives that explore subjective experiences in relation to political landscapes.  Using language as a response to images and images as a response to the aesthetic of text, she attempts to reveal the unreliability of facts, history, numbers, and statistics.

Alsharif’s award-winning work has shown in solo exhibitions and film festivals internationally. At the 9th Sharjah Biennial, she received a jury prize for her video We Began by Measuring Distance (2009).  At the Images Festival Ontario, she was awarded the Marion McMahon Award.  In 2009-2010 she was awarded the Fundación Marcelino Botín Visual Arts Grant.

Excerpt of the short film, Home Movies Gaza:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/58171442[/vimeo]

This event is sponsored by the Rachel Corrie Foundation and Olympia Film Society.  Admission is $10 General Admission, $7 OFS Members, $4 Kids (12 and under).  Tickets are available online or day of at the box office.  Doors open at 3:30 p.m. For information contact the Olympia Film Society at 360.754.6670 or Amirah at [email protected] or 360.754.3998.