re:assemblage collective

― DIFFUSION 2: Films of Parine Jaddo, 67' ―

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Indoor Screening
Friday 07 August 2026 · 6:30pm screening
CineCycle; 129 Spadina Avenue, Tkaronto

Entrance by donation at the door

Wheelchair accessible venue

It is the summer after the war. My mother plants. My sister reads. I cannot find my words. From this autofictional core begins Parine Jaddo’s trilogy of Atash (Thirst), Aisha (Surviving), and Teyh (Astray). This program unfolds through hybridity, polyvocality, fragmentation and elliptical rhythms, guided by female voices and subjectivities, mapping an encounter with the west while simultaneously refusing its categorical distinctions. Shaped by her own migratory existence and influenced by anticolonial thought and collaborations with peers at Howard University in the mid-1990s, the films explore diasporic cultural dissonance, rupture, desire and al-ghurba – an Arabic word that has no equivalent in English, but that can best be described as a feeling of estrangement or separation. This screening marks the recent digital restoration of the 16mm and 35mm works, their first presentation to audiences in over two decades, and their first-ever screening in Canada.

Atash (Thirst) · Parine Jaddo Aisha (Surviving) · Parine Jaddo Teyh (Astray) · Parine Jaddo

Aisha (Surviving)

Directed by Parine Jaddo
USA/Lebanon/Iraq · 1999 · 32'00 · 16mm to HD Video

Blending fiction and documentary, Aisha (Surviving) follows the gaze of an Arab-American filmmaker making a film about her immigrant cousin — a woman whose inner voice slowly disrupts the orientalizing narrative, revealing an emotional landscape marked by estrangement, cultural dissonance, and desire.

Parine Jaddo is an Iraqi film director whose works include Broken Record (Qawana), Rasta's Paradise, Aisha (Surviving) and Atash (Thirst). Working across fiction, documentary, experimental film, and installation, she began making films in the early 1990’s while a student at Howard University in Washington DC. During this time, she studied and worked with Ethiopian filmmakers Haile Gerima and Abraham (Abiyi) Ford. This experience exposed her to African and African-American culture, thought and aesthetics, in which she found resonance as an Iraqi immigrant living in the west, during the era of the Gulf War. Parine’s early 16mm films Aisha (Surviving) and Atash (Thirst) explore cultural dissonance, estrangement, desire and her own migratory existence. Her personal feature-length documentary Broken Record (Qawana) is a journey through Iraq guided by the memory of a song recorded by her mother in 1960. Released in 2013, Broken Record supported by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture and SANAD. She is currently based in Beirut, Lebanon. [↗]