Ki~Bé~Giš w/ "Primetime Mr. President"

Ki~Bé~Giš

Sama Waham (Dir), 85 minutes, Canada, New York State Premiere

Director Sama Waham and Associate Producer / Documentary Participant Jesse Rodkin (+ more TBA!) in attendance.

Ki~Bé ~ Giš (/Kee-beh - Geesh/) is a hybrid documentary rooted in Iraq’s October 2019 uprisings. Told through a diasporic lens, the film traces the rise and unraveling of a silenced revolution—one that, for a fleeting moment, stirred a shared sense of pride and resistance across the region, and in exile.

Blending chronicle and fable, the film interweaves footage from Baghdad’s protests with poetic narration that echoes Mesopotamian myths, where each era inherits the violent cycles of greed and loss from the ones before it. As fractured memories collide with longing, experimental fictional performances unfold across fragmented screens—meditating on displacement, injustice, and censorship, while grieving the burden of distance. A story of return—without returning.

w/

"Primetime Mr. President"

Saif Alsaegh (Dir), 6 minutes, USA, New York State Premiere

Director Saif Alsaegh in attendance.

Only a few weeks after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, former president George W. Bush gave a televised speech on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln declaring that his country had prevailed. "Primetime Mr. President" analyzes the speech, dubbed as “Mission Accomplished,” through the lens of what Iraqis had and will endure from horrible insurgency, civil and sectarian wars, and the overarching senes of death for years and years, and years to come.