Sunday, November 25, 2007

Sealed the deal


This last weekend was The Big Mix Up in Houston, TX which I shot for the film. I met a lot of cool new folks including finally meeting Sheikh Hashim Alaudeen. We shot a good number of hours with him after the event at a Houston Middle Eastern restaurant. A strange encounter ensued when we engaged two Egyptian women who were sitting and eavesdropping on our discussion about ambiguous racial appearances and racial/ethnic identity. They didn't want to be on camera but one of them was so abrasive towards us that she couldn't help but want to bring up our sectarian religious differences, which was completely unrelated to the subject.
Special thanks to Shiraz Jafri who came out on Saturday to operate camera.
It looks like the US portion of the film is done filming. Now moving onto Iran.

*The above photo was taken during our layover in Phoenix.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Sunday, November 04, 2007

dramatic irony and other updates


As I continue putting off work for my only "academic" course I was itching to update.

1. Seymour Hersh gives a talk on Iran at the annual Amnesty International conference in Ireland. This video is only the first hour of his talk and I have been unable to locate the full talk.

2. I will upload new raw footage from the air show ASAP.

3. The recent FRONTLINE on Iran was fairly well done and did a good job talking about the official positions of each country.

4. I found this Wide Angle program on the Arab talk show Kalam Nawaem (کلام نواعم) to be worth watching. Thanks to PBS for making the shows available online.

5. I am driving to the Lone Star International Film Festival in Fort Worth, Texas on Thursday. The Runners got selected to play in the Latino Shorts program. Go to the film's blog for more info. If you live in Texas I expect you to be there :P

*The racist illustration above is from my textbook, On Film-making by Alex Mackendrick written in 2004.