Experiments in Personal Documentary with Nadia Shihab

Award-winning filmmaker, artist, and educator Nadia Shihab brings her work to Museum of the Moving Image for the first time, on the heels of receiving a prestigious 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship. The program begins with a live artist talk, “Reassemblage in the Relational Film,” in which she explores how her filmmaking practice responds to rupture and loss through the reworking of fragments while centering intergenerational collaboration, sound, the feminist archive, and resistance. The talk will be followed by a screening of three films:  

Our Voices in Reverse (Portrait of Mama) 
Dir. Nadia Shihab. 2022, 3 mins. Digital Projection. In the summer of 2013, Shihab filmed an experiment in role reversal from the roof of her mother’s home in West Texas with a Super 8 camera, the beginning of a long, ongoing practice with analogue film. Edited in camera on Super 8 black-and-white reversal film. 

Echolocation  
Dir. Nadia Shihab. 2021, 9 mins. In Iraqi Turkish (Turkman) and English. Digital Projection. The rain in Oakland, her grandmother’s home in Baghdad, aunts’ voices in What’s App; her daughter learning to count to 10, brother playing the darbuka, the cicadas in Texas…through layers of photographs and intimate voice recordings, Echolocation immerses the viewer within the refracted state of longing and nostalgia in the wake of change. 

Sister Mother Lover Child 
Dir. Nadia Shihab. 2023, 18mins. Iraqi Turkish (Turkman) and English. Digital Projection. It is spring, yet all is colored by a season of grief in a house with women adjusting to life in the aftermath of an event unnamed. Suspended together with them in this liminal state, we form an unlikely constellation, held in the frame until we find the form. 

Tickets: $17.50 / $12 senior and students / $10 youth (ages 3–17) / free for MoMI members at the Senior/Student level and above. There is a $1.50 transaction fee per ticket for all online purchases. The cost of admission may be applied toward a same-day purchase of a membership. 

Order tickets. Please pick up tickets at the Museum’s admissions desk upon arrival. All seating is general admission.