Category: projects

You can stream A Thin Wall anywhere in the world

Happy independence from colonialism to all our South Asian fam and friends! In order to celebrate, we have made A Thin Wall available for streaming everywhere. You can watch it on Amazon Prime Movies and Videos in the USA and UK and on Vimeo in the rest of the world! Pls check it out today and share with friends 🙂

Group interview for The Injured Body: A Film about Racism in America

The beautiful women we interviewed today, Rajesh Barnabas and I, for The Injured Body: A Film about Racism in America: Luticha A Doucette, Khadija Mehter, and Marcella Davis. It was one of the most honest, heartbreaking and intense conversations I’ve had so far. Such brilliance and power in one art-filled, light-filled, Rochester loft (thank u for ur hospitality, Luticha).

Luticha A Doucette, Khadija Mehter and Marcella Davis

dance shoot at eastman durand beach

brilliant #film #shoot at #eastmandurand #beach in #rochester #newyork yesterday for The Injured Body: A Film about Racism in America
#dance #choreography by Mariko Yamada
#performances by Andrea Vazquez-Aguirre Kaufmann, Nanako Horikawa, and Cloria Iampretty
#cinematography by Rajesh Barnabas
#directed by Mara Ahmed

Andrea Vazquez-Aguirre Kaufmann and Nanako Horikawa

Cloria Iampretty

Photographing Greta Niu at the Public Market

Today #EricaJae and I #photographed @Greta Niu, Ph.D. at the Rochester Public Market. Greta is Director of Grants at Planned Parenthood of Central and Western New York. She’s also a mom, an academic, activist, and educator. She’s featured in #TheInjuredBody: A #Film about #Racism in #America. I am saving Erica’s professional shots for a photography exhibition that will take place in conjunction with the premiere of the film. Here are some of the photographs I took. It was hot and very lively at the public market.

greta niu

greta niu and evan lowenstein

Photographing Lu Highsmith

This morning Erica Jae and I photographed poet and founder of Roc Bottom Slam Team, Lu Highsmith. Lu chose the Phillis Wheatley Community Library as the location of the shoot, a library where she read voraciously as a child and where Shawn Dunwoody has done some remarkable artwork. Lu’s niece, La Tasha Jones, agreed to be in some pictures. Lu was interviewed for The Injured Body: A Film about Racism in America (a work in progress).

Erica Jae and Lu Highsmith

La Tasha Jones and Lu Highsmith

Conflicting dreams and realities: Amos Oz in Rochester

Amos Oz, Israel’s most beloved writer and intellectual, was here in Rochester a few weeks ago. He gave a lecture on “Zionism: Conflicting Dreams” at the University of Rochester which provoked many thoughts and emotions in me. I wrote about it. It was published by Mondoweiss today. More here.

Opening U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem pours oil on flames in midst of turmoil

On May 17th, the Jewish Federation of Greater Rochester published a disturbing piece about Israel’s independence day and the violence in Gaza, in the Democrat and Chronicle. I am not going to link to it. I responded by debunking some of the inaccuracies, point by point. They did not publish. Will add below. However, they did publish an essay/response by Melanie Duguid-May, from Christians Witnessing for Palestine. Here it is.

My Response:

Activists in the Rochester community were stunned to read “A historic moment marred by violence,” a piece written by Rina Chessin and Meredith Dragon of Jewish Federation of Greater Rochester and published on May 17, 2018.

Without going into a detailed debunking of historical inaccuracies, here are some corrections that merit to see the light of day:

– May 15, 1948, 70 years ago, also marks the beginning of the Palestinian Nakba or Catastrophe whereby Palestinian villages were systematically ethnically cleansed and 700,000 Palestinian people were ejected from what became Israel. Many of those refugees are still ghettoized in the Gaza Strip.

– East Jerusalem is occupied territory and not part of Israel’s capital. According to B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, in 1967 “Israel unlawfully annexed East Jerusalem to its territory. Since then, and despite its incursion upon their home, it has treated the Palestinian residents of the city as unwanted immigrants and worked systematically to drive them out of the area.”

– Palestinian protests have nothing to do with Hamas or the embassy move. They started weeks earlier to demand an end to the Gaza blockade (described as the largest open-air prison in the world) and to reinstitute the right of people living in Gaza to free movement (guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and a return to their homes, hence the “Great Return March.”

– It’s the Israeli army that has been accused of using Palestinian civilians as human shields, most notably by the Goldstone Report, during incursions into Gaza. Israel has violently attacked a blockaded Gaza, which the Palestinian population cannot leave, 14 times since it “withdrew” in 2005. Hamas was created in 1988. Why has Israel been occupying Gaza since 1967?

– No border was being breached. It’s a fence with a massive buffer zone erected by Israel that concentrates Palestinians into a small, densely populated camp. Israel has never declared its borders, as the process of ethnic cleansing and grabbing more land is ongoing.