LSD and yooouuutuuube.com

This is the most amazing site ever: yooouuutuuube.com. I call it LSD tube. You enter your youtube URL and it comes out looking like a living blotter of acid paper. When you watch it, each frame on the grid moves independently, but when you look at it as whole you see new images arise. It's like every moment is echoing and trailing behind the way LSD warps and bends time.

For an example look at my short film 'Dream of Samarra' in normal mode. Now through the LSD tube. And now check it out in shuffle mode.'

I created a page that showcases two short films through the yooouuutuuube.com, go here: http://baghdadvideo.com
[click on the images to watch the film]

Usama Talks unemployment with Kristie

Bad Lit review of Solar Anus Cinema

"Chicago-based filmmaker Usama Alshaibi is the modern master of transgressive cinema."


By Mike Everleth

Iraqi-born, Chicago-based filmmaker Usama Alshaibi has collected ten of his short films made between 2001 and 2008 for "Solar Anus Cinema." This DVD shines a light on the transgressive director’s interest in the female form primarily through a series of highly stylized film portraits of women.

Nine out of the ten films included are short profiles of women that run just a few minutes long. The tenth film, the longer running narrative "The Amateurs," I’ll deal with below. But, with the portraits, sometimes the object of them is Alshaibi’s wife, performance artist Kristie Alshaibi, but mostly he has convinced other women to pose, strut or writhe in front of his camera’s leering gaze.

The antecedent to Alshaibi’s transgressive work here is Richard Kern’s 1993 "My Nightmare," an autobiographical fiction that has the director fantasizing about getting it on with a sexy nude photography model while in “real” life the model is repulsed by his come ons.

For his own female portraits, Alshaibi rarely inserts himself into the action, but his presence is always strongly felt in each piece. While the women are typically posed alone in a studio, Alshaibi’s moving camera constantly reminds us that his subjects are never by themselves, that they are sharing their space with a director who runs his camera over their bodies, soaking in the whole of them as well as their individual parts. Sometimes it’s by an aggressive camera that races and moves in, out and around its nude or barely-clad subject, other times it’s a static camera locked on a tripod that still achieves the same effect through cutting between close-ups, medium shots and full body shots.

Also, whereas Kern explored his physical fantasies in "My Nightmare," Alshaibi’s own realized fantasies are purely what we get: Visual. Alshaibi seems genuinely fascinated just by the mere bodily existence of these women. With the exception of his own wife, the women are purely objectified. They are objects to be viewed and admired and there is no tension that Alshaibi wants to touch any of them. His camera’s piercing gaze is all the penetration he needs.

read the full review on badlit.com

Usama talks Iran prtotest with Iranian guest and a cold beer

We mentioned Neda. She is one of the protesters that was shot to death. Here is Neda dying in front of us. Caution this is a very graphic and hard video to watch.