Reviews

Nahla Ink Stars: 4 out of 5!

Long overdue, the United Kingdom finally sees the publication of the Iraqi-Canadian Leilah Nadir’s book: ‘The Orange Trees of Baghdad: In Search of My Lost Family’. As the UK was one of the prime architects of the Iraqi Invasion in 2003 – an event that irreversibly transformed the author’s life - it seems right that people here should have access to her story.

Nahla Ink Stars - 3 out of 5!

With its bright yellow cover and a back page that reads very much like the synopsis of a great romance, I thought this book was some kind of chick-literature. However, opening the front page and reading the introduction, it is clear that the book is based on the true memoirs of the English Dorothy Al Khafaji, who was born and bred in Somerset, England but through extraordinary fate, had to travel to and live almost two decades in Baghdad, Iraq between 1962 to 1980.

Modest World Premiere in Brighton, UK

You don’t expect to attend the world premiere of a very important, culturally significant and fascinating anthropological film experiment in a medium-sized lecture hall in the city of Brighton, UK. In a room of about forty tops, a group of international women were attending the Women in Art, Science and Research Conference and pleasantly surprised to be the very first audience to see the film adaptation of the scandal causing and goose-pumps’ creating BuSSy Monologues. Khalid Abol Naga, the multi-award winning Egyptian director of the film adaptation, and Sondos Shabayek and Mona El-Shimi, two of the creative members of the BuSSy Project, were personally present and super nervous and excited to gage our response. 

One has to wonder what kind of Art would come today from the holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Indeed, would there even be room for it in a place reserved just for Muslim pilgrims who arrive at least once in their lifetime to pray, face God and do the necessary rituals to get closer to the Divine.