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Hadani Ditmars is the author of Dancing in the No-Fly Zone: A Woman’s Journey Through Iraq, a past editor at New Internationalist, and has been reporting from the Middle East on culture, society and politics for two decades.
Her work has been published in the New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Sight and Sound, the San Francisco Chronicle, Haaretz, Wallpaper, Vogue and Ms. Magazine, and broadcast on CBC, BBC, NPR and RTE. Her next book, Between Two Rivers, is a political travelogue of ancient sites in Iraq.
A small, darkened theater in Hackney was transformed this month into a portal for Palestine, Bradford, New York City, and a London suburb. But the quartet of monologues by Hassan Abdulrazzak—performed admirably by Asif Khan—traversed these disparate landscapes using humor as subversion, providing a unique window into otherwise humorless subjects.
Iraqi Narrative of U.S. Invasion Struggles to Be Heard
A new American opera called Fallujah debuted this spring, bringing attention to post-traumatic stress disorders suffered by U.S. marines who fought in Iraq. The opera joins a list of American artworks that have explored the impact of the Iraq war on American lives. The big elephant in the room, however, are the Iraqi victims of the war and the deafening silence in U.S. discourse on the horrific consequences the war brought on them.
When the Mongols invaded Baghdad in 1258, they laid siege to the city’s libraries, including the famed House of Wisdom—the largest in the world at the time.
A center for Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars, the destruction of the library remains one of the most famous examples of cultural loss during wartime.
Nine centuries later, Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal has taken the fate of the House of Wisdom as a starting point for a cultural project aimed at rebuilding the library of the Baghdad College of Fine Arts, destroyed in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion.
New Documentary Honors Father of Modern Iranian Sculpture
At the edge of the Pacific, in a bucolic suburb of Vancouver called Horseshoe Bay, the “father of modern Iranian sculpture” has lived a quiet existence since 1989.
Despite being a pioneer of Iranian modernism and one of the founders of the Saqqakhaneh School of Art in mid-20th century Tehran, Parviz Tanavoli has been virtually invisible in Vancouver.
Today, however, a new documentary about the artist directed by Canadian filmmaker Terrence Turner has bridged the chasm between the Middle East and the Pacific Northwest.
Middle Eastern Cinema in the Spotlight at Palm Springs
Palm Springs is not a place normally associated with cutting edge Middle Eastern cinema.
In fact, the obvious connections to the region are more about geography and agriculture—desert scenes reminiscent of Palestine or Iraq, date palms from North Africa—than film.
