The Narrow Streets of Bourj Hammoud, 72min

This 72 minute experimental non-fiction film, a collaboration with Lebanese artist Rosy Kuftedjian, was funded by a Wenner-Gren Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship in Ethnographic Film. In the film, participants in Bourj Hammoud, Lebanon create maps of their city while talking about memory, space and history through the materiality of this dense urban neighborhood which is a major hub for migrants from all over the world and, more recently, displaced people from Syria.

You can view a trailer and the map drawings from the film here.

We Have No Name, 7 min,

Premiered at the London International Documentary Film Festival, 2008.

Just a few hours east of Los Angeles, in the vast southern California desert, lies the Salton Sea, a salt lake created by a flood in 1905 in the desert east of Los Angeles. While much of it appears to symbolize the destructive power of shortsighted human projects -- abandoned hotels, sunken trailer homes, dead fish – the lake is one of the last remaining habitats for hundreds of birds displaced by rampant development of the wetlands in Southern California.

In this film, a series of images starkly illustrate the fuzzy boundaries between man's "built environment" and "nature." the city and the desert, the “manmade” and the “natural.” The Salton Sea and its environs is a place that challenges these taken-for-granted domains, and my video is an attempt not to resolve these opposing images into a coherent narrative, but to raise more questions, to unsettle.

The accompanying score was composed by Los Angeles based ensemble, Rats.

Gigi (from 9-5), 7min

Filmed in 2001 while I was an undergraduate at NYU, this 16mm experimental musical is about a young woman’s quotidian routine—from waking up to going to work to returning home. It was envisioned as a critique of work, inspired by my own experience doing data-entry. The film was included in Miranda July’s Joanie4Jackie feminist film and video compilation series and is now available on the Criterion Channel.

Your Eyes, My Ears, 4min

An Armenian woman remembers her pet canary. Filmed in Beirut, Lebanon.