AISHA

A Movie Written & Directed by Parine Jaddo

Dialogue Written by Seanie Blue & Parine Jaddo 

Blue wrote the dialogue with Parine Jaddo for her short movie "Aisha," filmed on the eve of the first American conflict with Iraq. Jaddo was a Princess Grace fimmaker awardee, and this movie was screened at the Women's Museum of Art in Washington DC as well as venues worldwide from Beirut to Paris. Sandie Black did a star turn as the young Arab-American who has her feet firmly planted in two different cultures. Directed & Produced by Parine Jaddo, who shot the movie on 35mm film while a film professor at Howard University.

The movie has been praised by media worldwide, from Washington to Paris to Addis. Patrick Tracey in the City Paper wrote the "film explores the twin sides of a woman who journeys from the Middle East in pursuit of the American dream," while Tom Wiener called the movie an "ambitious impressionistic drama" in his notes to the 2001 DC Filmfest, in which Weiner claimed Aisha was the most compelling and most accomplished of all the shorts in the festival.

This movie is still in demand whenever festivals or forums focus on the social conditions of Arabic women, and Arabic-American women in particular. Whether it's Cairo, Beirut or Oslo, the movie is invited to bring a view of frustration and ambition rarely shown in the Arabic cinema. The story should be expanded and made into a feature-length project, but Jaddo has just completed a movie in Ethiopia and Blue is lost in battle on his own frontlines.

From the movie box cover:

"Nasrine struggles to escape the political and economic miseries of the modern Arabic world by immersing herself into American life. She pursues her dream of becoming a television producer and enjoys her routine in Washington D.C. But she can’t help clinging to various aspects of Arab culture, such as aesthetics or personal honesty. Nasrine’s Americanized cousin Tina decides to capture on film Nasrine’s struggle between cultures. Obssessed with her film school thesis, Tina encourages the growing split in Nasrine’s personality until the American Nasrine faces failure in her professional life while the Arabic Nasrine matures into the pragmatic feminist of an ideal -- but unreal -- Middle East. Tina’s movie is completed, but her cousin Nasrine is left broken in half, pulled in different directions by her Am erican opportunities and her Arabic traditions."

From the movie's script notes by Parine Jaddo & Seanie Blue:

The words below are the only creative writing found in the papers and personal effects of Nasrine K., who became the first person to commit suicide by jumping off Eden Roc since before the war. Her death was a shock to the community of new Beirut, for whom she represented the ambitious and educated young woman of the Arab diaspora’s future. For more than three years, her friends spoke about the novel she was supposedly writing as she worked in Washington as a television producer. The novel was titled Aisha, which means “life” in Arabic. Her cousin Tina K. could find no evidence of a novel either on paper or on Nasrine’s computer after the suicide on October 24, 1996. The notes below were all Tina K. could find. The poem was published in the Lebanese press, and now little girls bring flowers to the seaside promenade in front of Eden Roc, but they do so for “Aisha,” and not for “Nasrine.” Tina K.’s documentary about her cousin Nasrine has just been completed, and will be distributed worldwide in 1999, also under the name “Aisha.”

Express myself, please.
Why is writing so difficult?

My Home
A place of history and flavor.
Men spilling blood for land or water.
Women bleeding for the family.
Children protected
from the sight of blood.

Exile
I flew west (towards the sunset),
trusting that happiness was there in the dark.
Now my heart falls a little
at every day break.

Desire
I am punished for my desire.
I am a whore
because I’ve slept with five men.
But I am a slave when I sleep with just one.

Conflict
A dead general’s face is in my carpet.
He is always beneath my feet.
He robs people of their memory.
He makes people poor.
But who is the general?
Who are my people?

Escape
Of course I have considered suicide.
Perhaps I could dive from the cliff
when nobody is watching.
But in my country,
everybody watches a suicide.

The End
Nobody watches me write.
Why is writing so difficult?