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Director: Loch Phillipps
Assistant Editor: Alaa’ Seoudy
“The feature documentary, Utica: The Last Refuge, picks up the story of the Azein family from their arrival in the US. The film follows them for two and a half years as they transition from isolation in a completely unfamiliar place to employment and becoming part of a larger, thriving community. Utica’s decision to welcome refugee populations has been a major factor in the city’s economic turnaround. Utica: The Last Refuge is the story of a city and — most important -- a resettlement agency determined to make America a new home for refugees.”
Indiana, Pennsylvania sits at the foot of the Allegheny Mountains — a small town of 15,000, a Jimmy Stewart museum, and a handful of Thai restaurants run by women who came from the other side of the world. The Days After follows a circle of people bound together by work, proximity, and acts of care that go mostly unnamed — across three years, through morning shifts, school buses, grocery runs, and phone calls to people who are very far away. No rescue. No resolution. Just the slow, daily negotiation of being here.
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Director: Alaa’ Seoudy, and Loch Phillipps
Editor: Alaa’ Seoudy
Unpublished. I can provide a private link.
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Director: Loch Phillipps
Editor: Alaa’ Seoudy
Muhamed, a refugee from Bosnia has hired An Wa, a Burmese refugee to work alongside him at his shop, 2M Auto. Representing Utica's two largest refugee groups, their ability to transcend cultural differences via their shared experience is emblematic of why refugee resettlement works so well there.
Unpublished. I can provide a private link.
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Director: Ahmed Fawzi Saleh
Assistant Editor: Alaa’ Seoudy
« Set in the confines of an impoverished Cairo neighborhood, a community's everyday life is threatened by the ruthless rhythms of Tanneries, rotary driers crushing animal skin, hazards of poisonous wastewater, Tahyea desperately clings to her brother, Saqr, whose only dream is to escape »
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Director: Seth Fein
Consultant Editor: Alaa’ Seoudy
“BETWEEN NEIGHBORHOODS (110', 2024, 2016) contemplates, mostly in split-screen, the global and local histories of immigration and imperialism, social and corporate globalizations that orbit the Unisphere between the age of Trump and AOC and that of Robert Moses, who built the giant stainless-steel armillary sphere to center the 1964-65 New York World's Fair at the crossroads of his metropolitan empire, in Queens. Juxtaposing original and archival footage, the documentary diptych connects NYC's crossborough present and past. This 2024 reboot features significant new research –– archival footage and audio – as well as original video to reformulate this work as its subject celebrates its sesqucentennial. Winner of the Founders Choice Award for Documentary at the Queens World Film Festival in 2017, Between Neighborhoods has exhibited transatlantically and is available for individual and institutional rental or purchase.”
