I Can’t Think Straight is a film by Shamim Sarif that attempts to deal with culture, religion, and sexuality within the period of an hour and fifteen minutes. The story tells the tale of Leyla, an Indian Muslim, who falls in love with Tala, a Jordanian Christian. Heavy on Orientalist porn and thin on a […]

The Glass House, directed by Hamid Rahmanian, is a documentary of the lives of a group of young women at the Omid e Mehr day center in Tehran. These women deal with a range of issues, including drug addiction and sexual, physical, and verbal abuse. Omid e Mehr’s staff provides these women with social services […]

Women of Hezbollah is a 50-minute film directed by Maher Abi Samra. It takes place between 1996 and 2000. Ten years after the last Israeli aggression (and defeat) in south Lebanon, reviewing this documentary may sound anachronistic. But sometimes distance helps to get a more accurate insight about Hezbollah–a major political actor that is unjustly […]

This article was written by Jordan Robinson and originally appeared at AltMuslimah. It’s a hard lesson for many of us to learn: how to be confident, strong and bold while maintaining a healthy balance of humble demure with friends, family and elders. It’s usually a lesson that involves us trying to prove our maturity, leadership […]

Pray the Devil Back to Hell is a documentary about the women’s peace movement in Liberia, during the conflict between Charles Taylor’s government and the warlords of Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD). It was directed by Gini Reticker, who has directed several other documentaries about women in Africa, including a film about the […]

This was written by Elise Auerbach and originally published on Human Rights Now, the Amnesty International USA blog. Ordinarily, human rights activists would be pleased when the rare major motion picture shining a light on human rights violations comes along. In fact, aside from documentaries, it is very unusual to see issues that Amnesty International […]

Mosque in Morgantown, a documentary about Asra Nomani’s quest to eradicate gender segregation in the mosque, airs tonight on PBS at 10 pm EST. I watched the film this weekend. Twice. I took three pages of notes, but still had a difficult time writing a review. This could be because my head has been in […]

This post was written by Farah Banihali and originally published at Nuseiba. For another perspective on Persson’s documentary, check out Alicia’s article from a few weeks ago. Iran has always been a country I’d love to sit down and read up on. When I first started university, I wrote a (terrible) essay on the causes […]

For a relatively high-brow TV channel, BBC4 is known for providing top quality programs and dramas. So when the BBC commemorated the 30th anniversary of Islamic Revolution in Iran, I became glued to the channel’s string of intriguing documentaries on all things Iranian, post-1979. There were plenty on Iran-US nuclear politics and the fall of […]

I saw the movie Taken with my friend and her husband the other day and walked out of the theater feeling scared. It’s not a horror movie; the plot focuses on the sex trafficking of young women. The buyers are rich Arab men, of course. I wanted to be angry with the filmmakers for portraying […]