New York, NY
Saturday, July 27, 2019 • 4:45 PM
Tickets available online, adults $16, Seniors and children $13
Nermeen Shaikh will join Directors Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts and featured subject Dr. Hamza al-Kateab for a Q&A following the screening of “For Sama” on its opening weekend.
FOR SAMA is both an intimate and epic journey into the female experience of war. A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her.
Her camera captures incredible stories of loss, laughter and survival as Waad wrestles with an impossible choice– whether or not to flee the city to protect her daughter’s life, when leaving means abandoning the struggle for freedom for which she has already sacrificed so much.
The film is the first feature documentary by Emmy award-winning filmmakers, Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts.
Nermeen Shaikh is a co-host and senior producer at Democracy Now! She worked briefly at Al Jazeera English in Washington, D.C. before joining Democracy Now! in 2011.
She serves on the Board of Directors of the Nobel Women’s Initiative.
She was previously the Managing Editor at Asia Society and a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London. She has also worked at development and research organizations in Islamabad and Tehran.
Shaikh is the author of The Present as History: Critical Perspectives on Global Power (Columbia University Press) and the editor of Slums, Security and Shelter in Pakistan (Vanguard Books).
She has been an invited speaker on issues ranging from global politics and independent media to psychoanalysis and literature at venues including the United Nations, the psychoanalysis division of the American Psychological Association, and the European Association for Commonwealth Literature. She has presented a TEDx talk in Budapest and been a featured speaker at the Toronto International Film Festival.
She has also served on the jury of the Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards.
In addition, Shaikh has appeared in contemporary art exhibitions including at the Guggenheim Museum in New York as an interpreter/participant in Tino Sehgal’s “This Progress” and as an actor in Philippe Parreno’s film installation, “The Crowd” at the Park Avenue Armory.
She starred in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s short film as “the Radio” in the 2020 series titled “Homemade”.
Shaikh has a B.A. (Honours) in political studies from Queen’s University and an M.Phil. in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University.