11’55”

2018

1991 is a documentary film revolving around a conversation between the filmmaker, an Iraqi asylum-seeker living in the U.S., and his mother Bushra Alsaegh, an Iraqi immigrant living in Turkey waiting for approval to immigrate to the U.S. Both are in uncertain positions regarding their immigration statuses and haven’t been able to see each other for years. 1991 navigates the distance between them. Through a Facetime call, the film expresses the ways that a relationship becomes virtual and symbolic across forced distances. 1991 is set in a cabin where the filmmaker lives a semi-imaginary, peaceful life, building fires, cooking, and dancing. The central phone conversation details Bushra’s memory of the filmmaker’s birth in the middle of the 1991 Gulf War, and the danger and suffering she went through, through poetic juxtaposition of the virtual landscape of the phone, the calm landscape of the cabin, and the chaotic landscape of memory…