Press, Reviews, Interviews

“Shihab models what it means to engage with personal archives in expansive, generative ways—to allow for greater knowledge of ourselves as we burst forth into the future, continually in motion with the material of our past.”

- Sarah Bakke, DOXA

JADDOLAND

"Intimate, experimental, and beautifully playful."
- Documentary Award Jury, Austin Asian American Film Festival

"Jaddoland is a breath of fresh air: a film not tied down by convention or structure, it playfully and thoughtfully plumbs issues of identity, art, and belonging."
- Clint Bowie, Artistic Director, New Orleans Film Festival

“As Nadia watches, a picture emerges of what an uncareful observer might call assimilation: an outward adjustment obscuring depths of diasporic longing, the doubling and tripling of identities always grounded by that shifting but insistent anchor, the question of home.”
- Jon Kieran, Senior Programmer, New Orleans Film Festival

“Shihab’s palpable love for her mother courses through her film and “Jaddoland” functions both as a tribute to her work and life as well as a sincere interrogation of the idea of “home,” how the concept morphs and evolves depending on one’s own comfort with their journey.”
- Vikram Murthi, rogerebert.com

“[Shihab's] contemplation of the meaning of home unfolds also as a deeply moving meditation on the impact of time.
- Lisa Elin, Houston Film Critics Society

"Lying somewhere between experimental and home movie, filmmaker Nadia Shihab’s debut documentary JADDOLAND is a film as much about the shiftiness of place and personhood, as it is about Shihab’s curiosity as she gets reacquainted with a mother who evolves away from her in surprising ways."
- Christina Ree, San Diego Asian Film Festival

"Jaddoland’s expansive aesthetics creates new spaces for diverse audience reflections about how identity and culture are not only inherited but re-created and co-created across geography and time."
- Natalie Nesvaderani and Miasarah Lai, Visual Anthropology Review

AMAL’S GARDEN

"In Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, almost ten years after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Kurdish, Turkish and Iraqi flags fly side by side. The filmmaker of Amal’s Garden approaches this coexistence obliquely, with infinite tenderness, filming only what is intimate..." Charlotte Garson, Cinema du Reel

"A vivid portrait of a family, and a suggestive portrait of a complex community, with a few small strokes" - Shelly Kraicer, Vancouver International Film Festival

"A delicate and empathetic portrayal" - Karol Kućmierz, Ars Independent Film Festival

"A story of tenderness amid ever shifting conditions. It captures the of life of a small embattled family living under the hegemony of three competing flags- now four-and it shows the resilience of an ethnic minority in a pseudo state where those who rule are always changing.” Nezar AlSayyad, University of California, Berkeley

My words

Echolocation, Mizna Journal, The Experimental Issue, 2021

Doing the Work, Podcast Review, Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2020

Enclosures, Wolfman New Life Quarterly, Issue 5, 2019

What Stories we Long to Hear, We Will Write Ourselves, Firelight Media (Medium), 2018