Al Tabbab is the story of a boy and his father, accompanied with their goat, on an old dhow sailing to a secret ritual site where they perform an ancient offering ritual in order to harvest pearls from a mysterious Sea Monster. On this journey, the boy sets sail determined to impress his father and make him proud. But searching for pearls is no easy task and with the odds against him, the boy struggles with his father’s demands and he can’t help but feel like he’s a big disappointment. But when the Sea Monster prefers the boys pet goat to the usual offerings, the boy must perform a gallant rescue in order to save his friend from certain death and to show his father that he’s ready to be his own man.

Drawing upon his Iraqi-Jewish heritage, Michael Rakowitz critiques ongoing systems of colonization in his sculptural and participatory work. The artist recounts a formative memory from his childhood, when his mother took him to see reliefs depicting the lion hunt of Ashurbanipal in the Assyrian galleries at the British Museum and posed the question, “What is this doing here?” For Rakowitz, this moment crystalized his understanding of museums as places of extraction, colonization, and crime. In his work today, Rakowitiz explores ways to subvert the imperialist role of museums, interrogate the value they place on objects over people, and create ongoing systems for repair and accountability.

Wajib, or A Duty, is an experimental short film that explores the Koufiyyeh Scarf as mask-- something that can protect.
This film is an intimate response to a recent personal experience that occurred in New York City, one month before the Covid-19 shutdown. A passerby pointed to the scarf around my neck and called it, "a terrorist scarf."

Spanish director Jan Pauls brings to life a photograph taken by Emad Nassar in Gaza in 2015 depicting two girls being cared for by their father. What they call 'home' may be something else from now on.