Profane premieres at Chicago Underground Film Festival Friday June 3 and June 8

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Boston Underground Film Festival Awards This Year's Vibrating Bunnies - indieWIRE

Boston Underground Film Festival Awards This Year's Vibrating Bunnies - indieWIRE

The films at the Boston Underground Film Festival all compete for the festival’s singular award: a vibrating bunny statuette. The award is given to winners from all categories, with this year’s recipients being announced Sunday night.

Usama Alshaibi’s “Profane” was the unanimous winner of the Best of the Fest Award. The same prize went to Can Evernol’s “To My Mother and Father” in the Shorts section.

“I am very honored and grateful for this award, and it gives me hope to continue to make these difficult films,” said Alshabi. “BUFF is truly a significant and vital underground film festival.”

PROFANE wins Best of Fest Feature at Boston Underground Film Festival

'Profane' film review in Boston Phoenix

In Iraqi-American filmmaker Usama Alshaibi's PROFANE (2010; Kendall Square: March 26 @ 11:55 pm + March 29 @ 9:45 pm), Muna, a Chicago dominatrix, discusses how much she likes her job as she uses a riding crop to prod the genitals of a bound and masked client. But Muna is also a lapsed Muslim. She hears voices, which the solicitous cab driver Ali explains are coming from a jinn, a kind of guardian demon, who haunts her.

Torn between ecstasy and submission, Muna takes an unorthodox path to enlightenment, one that Profane dramatizes with documentary methods and psychedelic imagery. In the best underground tradition, Alshaibi — who recently was savagely beaten in an anti-Arab hate crime — demonstrates that true reverence sometimes requires transgression.

From Boston Phoenix By PETER KEOUGH | March 16, 2011

PROFANE North American Premiere at the Boston Underground Film Festival

PROFANE will have its US premiere at the Boston Underground Film Festival on Saturday, March 26th & 29th, 2011 at 11:55pm at the Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge, MA

When in a time of spiritual crisis, people may not be at their most rational. We meet Muna in the midst of just such a situation. Muna lives in Chicago and works as a dominatrix in self-imposed exile from her conservative family in the Middle East. What Muna is searching for is her “jinn,” the Islamic equivalent of a demon. Equal parts good and evil, a jinn is created from smokeless fire and resides in all of us according to the Quran. Muna is essentially seeking out demonic possession.

We stay with Muna throughout her pro-domme sessions, her tenuous friendship with a cabdriver named Ali, who attempts to reconnect her to the culture with which she has lost touch, and her libertine friend Mary, who brings Muna’s rebellious nature to the surface. We follow her through a maze of indulgence and excess in the hopes that she will find the sense of self that has been eluding her during her extended life in the States.

Renowned underground filmmaker Usama Alshaibi pulls no punches in his first film to grace BUFF screens since 2004. With its sado-masochistic eroticism juxtaposed with traditional Islamic imagery, it would be easy to dismiss Profane as anti-religious agit-prop. But Alshaibi invests so much depth in his main character, and so much lurks beneath the surface of his sometimes shocking setpieces, that it is easy to see that Profane is an intensely personal experience for its author. Known equally for his non-fiction filmmaking as he is for his contribution to transgressive cinema, Alshaibi applies his skills as a documentarian to this psycho-sexual horror story of one woman’s struggle with her identity and the culture clash between Middle Eastern mythology and Western pop culture. — Kevin Monahan

PROFANE European Premiere in Berlin

Playing February 13, at 10pm Directors Lounge

Cinema Alshaibi at Fat Rabbit

Husband and wife collaborators Usama and Kristie Alshaibi are presenting some rarely seen short videos created between 1998 and 2010. This will include early 16mm films by both directors as well as a number of collaborations shot on a wide array of mediums.

In addition, we will premiere a trailer of Usama’s new feature length movie, “Profane.”

The Alshaibis will be selling copies of their limited edition book A History of Flying Vaginas and their DVD of short artfully perverse films titled “Solar Anus Cinema.”

The event is FREE. But please help the Alshaibis in any way you can by buying merchandise or contributing to http://profanemovie.com to help raise finishing funds for the new feature. BYOB.

Saturday June 26, 2010
@Fat Rabbit 1711 S. Halsted,
Chicago, IL 60608

Film stills from Profane

Molly as Mary in Profane

http://profanethemovie.com

"Profane" movie trailer

Help me with finishing funds for my new movie "Profane"

http://www.indiegogo.com/profane?c=home

Looking back

Here I am on the set of 'Profane' from November 2008. I was in a crazed state of mind during the shoot. But we finished and I'm still editing. Shooting and directing all at once with a small crew was a curse and a blessing. Curse be gone!

Usama in Vice

"When I was a boy in Saudi Arabia I started praying five times a day and going to mosque. I guess I had a high regard for the Quran and yes, I believed in all of it. I really got into being a Muslim, much more than my own family. Later, when I discovered LSD and different ideas I was not so religious anymore. But I always had this feeling that something was not right about the whole deal with Islam and all the Abrahamic religions. After my brother died in 2006, I really became disillusioned with religion in general.

As I look at the Quran now all this stuff with Satan and the devil and Jinns becomes more of metaphor for good, evil, sex, and profanity. And this film PROFANE is my crisis I suppose. I had a nervous breakdown in the middle of production and we were plagued by a nasty flu virus infecting everyone and shutting down production for several days. All the BDSM in the film is real with true masochists and sadists. I had Muslims work on the film and we would assist the actor, Manal Kara, on how to pray properly. Although Manal is Arab and grew up in a Muslim country, her parents are Atheists and she knew very little about Islam.

With PROFANE, I wanted to link this idea of submission to something that is not you, something higher or stronger. The very word “Islam” means submission and “Muslim” means one who submits. So I found this very interesting in that the main character, Muna, plays a pro-Domme, who has slaves submit to her, but she submits in prayer to Allah.

I've always really been into religion and I'm especially interested in Pre-Islamic and Islamic mystical imagery and stories. But I do consider myself an Atheist, although I really don't like that word since it is a negation of something. I'm even questioning our notion of movement, time, the present, past, and future, and how to access all of it without this prescribed narrative in front of us.

So all of this stuff was in my head when I wrote PROFANE. This film kind of scares me because of its content and that shit that happened to Rushdie and VanGogh from Amsterdam. I want to say that it will not happen to me but I'm not sure. I lost my job during the end of the production of this film, but I am still shooting and editing. It's the only thing I have now and I protect it like a sick child."


Usama in Vice: read more...

photos from the production of Profane

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Muna played by Manal

From my new feature...