What is “She Sings”?
“She Sings” is a film about cultural and female identity, centering on the power of dreaming.
Aziza, an Egyptian-American woman, grapples with her identity one morning while recalling a bizarre and somewhat troubling dream to her husband at breakfast. After her description, we get to witness the dream, in which all that was said, unsaid, and implied is revealed, culminating in a surreal country-western musical number.
The short film will be broken into three distinct chapters, using three distinct filming styles, and throughout it all both Aziza’s conscious and subconscious conflicts and insecurities reveal themselves.
Why is this short film important to us?
“She Sings” tackles two things that we think about most: womanhood and Arab-American identity. As a married directing duo – male and female, one American and one Egyptian-American – we often consider where our identities overlap, where they don’t, and what we gain from creating a shared one. With “She Sings,” we’ve put that idea of our shared identity – and our mutual understanding of each other – to the test.
Although not alone, women and Arabs have both been maligned in cinema history – as well as American history – and better movies help to create a better cultural understanding. We hope to give women, Arab-Americans, and Arab-American women, a story that better represents the nuances and complexities that they are owed.
Centering our film on women is important, and just as important to us is what we do behind the scenes. We are committed to making sure at least half of our crew – specifically those in the highest creative and technical positions such as producing, cinematography, and editing – are women.
For some further context on why the image of Arabs on-screen needs to be reshaped, Jack Shaheen’s groundbreaking documentary Reel Bad Arabs (based on his book of the same name) confronts some of the more glaring issues:
A recent test sheds light on how Muslim women are portrayed onscreen. You can read/listen to NPR’s coverage by clicking here
And you can find an overview of statistics on women in the film industry here
So what’s up with the musical number?
In Aziza’s dream, she knows she has to sing a song but she doesn’t know when or where. When the time finally comes, it’s not at all what she expected.
For this project, we are working with singer-songwriter Daniel Knox (who, along with Nick Jones, also gave us the tremendous and sweeping score for our previous short film, “The Sailor”) to write, produce, and record an original song in Chicago at Steve Albini’s renowned studio, Electrical Audio.
