Did You Forget About Iraq?
Sahar al-Sawaf and Emma Piper-Burket
Did you forget about Iraq? calls attention to the fickle economies of the US news cycle to offer personal counter-narratives of Iraq through a collection of experimental nonfiction works by Sahar al-Sawaf and Emma Piper-Burket.
Program includes:
Uncle Ma’an, 2007, 4:15
Um Abdallah, 2009, 9:46
Dream City, 2016, 51:47
Shadow of Paradise, 2021, 7:07
Excerpt – Work-in-progress, 10:00
Sahar al-Sawaf is an Oregon based Iraqi filmmaker, animator, photographer, visual artist and storyteller who was born in Saudi Arabia, grew up in Lebanon and Iraq, then escaped to California as a child, days before the Gulf War. Working in documentary and animation, she has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East with her sketchbook and camera in hand, chronicling the plight of refugees who have fled. Sahar studied painting and graphic design at the University of California, Davis and was a Jules Engel Endowed Scholar in Experimental Animation at the California Institute of the Arts, where she graduated with her MFA in Film/Video. Her films have screened at DOC NYC, Chicago International Film Festival, Animafest Zagreb, Aesthetica Short Film, Tricky Women/Tricky Realities in Austria and The Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences. She was a 2018 Creative Culture Fellow at the Jacob Burns Film Center in New York and in 2021 she received a New York State Council for the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Video/Film.
Emma Piper-Burket is a visual artist, filmmaker, writer, and educator using fiction, non-fiction, and collected media to investigate interactions between nature, society, and the human spirit. Her work is process-based and research driven, incorporating social trends, ancient history, personal experience, science, politics, ephemera, and the natural world. Emma was a 2024 Flaherty Film Seminar Fellow and has received support from Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Ebert Foundation, Sundance Institute, Light Cone, Visual Studies Workshop, Marble House Project, and Middlebury Script Lab, among others for her creative works. She holds an MFA in Cinema and Digital Media from FAMU in Prague, and a BA in Arabic and Classical Studies from Georgetown University. She is currently a PhD Candidate in Critical Media Practice and a 2024-25 recipient of the Center for Humanities & Arts Dissertation Fellowship at The University of Colorado Boulder.
