Jaddoland

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Film screening and Q&A

Jaddoland explores the meaning of home and the search for belonging across generations. When the filmmaker returns to her hometown in the Texas panhandle to visit her mother, an artist from Iraq, she turns her lens on her mother’s increasingly isolated life, as well as the beauty and solace that emerge through her creative process. Soon, the filmmaker’s charismatic grandfather arrives from Iraq, prompting the filmmaker on a deeper search to understand her own roots and connections to the places she calls home.


Austin Asian American Film Festival​, Best​ ​Documentary Feature

Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival​, Special Jury Award for Best Documentary

New Orleans Film Festival, ​Special Jury Mention for Best Documentary

Running time: 90 min. Languages: English, Arabic, Iraqi Turkmen, with subtitles. Followed by Q&A with film director, Nadia Shihab.


About the Filmmaker

Nadia Shihab is an artist whose work draws on her interest in diasporic longing, relationships to place, and processes of improvisation. Her films explore and reassemble personal migratory narratives with a concern for the unseen—spaces of alienation, states of absence, the condition of dislocation—and the ways in which the unnoticed can be intimated and rendered visible. She has also composed music for several feature films.​ Her work has shown in film festivals and galleries internationally including the Centre Pompidou (Cinéma du Réel), Walker Art Center, Dubai International Film Festival, DOXA, New Orleans Film Festival, Dallas International Film Festival, CAAMFest, Indie Grits, Ashland Independent Film Festival and more. She lives and works in Oakland.