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Oxymoron films wins award
Maysoon won the IWC Schaffhausen Filmmaker Award for NOTHING DOING IN BAGHDAD at the Dubai International Film Festival.  This cash award is a very welcome kick-start to the project’s production funding and was announced at a dinner on December 10th and presented by actor, Cate Blanchett as president of the jury which included Olivier Pere, the head of Arte France Cinema, Masoud Amralla Al Ali, artistic director of the DIFF, Abdulhamid Juma, chairman of the festival and Georges Kern, CEO of IWC Schaffausen.   
Posted on 08 Jan 2013
Film School update
Alongside the development of the new fiction feature film project, NOTHING DOING IN BAGHDAD (see below) the work at the free-of-charge film-training centre in Baghdad, which Maysoon and her colleague, Kasim Abid, set up in 2004, has been continuing (www.iftvc.org).  The school re-opened in 2009 after a period of almost 2 years when it had to close because of intense sectarian violence in the city.  Dutch director Shuchen Tan made a documentary film for VPRO TV in Holland about the first course at the school after the re-opening, called BAGHDAD FILM SCHOOL.  This was widely shown at festivals and repeated on Al Jazeera English several times.  In 2010, the school collaborated with the Goethe institute in Iraq to produce 4 short documentaries about human rights in Iraq.  2 of these were made by former students at the school and in the spring of 2011, the school mounted a festival of its students’ films which travelled to 3 cities in Iraq - Baghdad, Basra and Erbil, where the filmmakers presented their films to an Iraqi audience for the first time.  Currently the school is running a documentary film course in Basra.
Posted on 09 Dec 2012
Nothing Doing in Baghdad
At the end of 2010, Maysoon and Irada Al Jabbouri, an Iraqi novelist, short story writer, women’s activist and lecturer at Baghdad University, produced their first draft screenplay of NOTHING DOING IN BAGHDAD (Arabic title: Kulshi Makoo) a fiction feature film.  The springboard for it was real-life Baghdad conversations, scenes and situations they witnessed and heard about in 2006/7.  Using this actuality material as a basis, they extrapolated and developed their characters and stories and turned it into a dramatic fiction film.
Posted on 09 Dec 2012
Our Feelings Took the Pictures
In 2010, there were numerous showings of ‘Our Feelings Took the Pictures’ which accompanied exhibitions of the remarkable photographic work created by the Iraqi women who participated in the Open Shutters Iraq project; including in April at the University of North Texas, in May at the Umam Hangar Gallery in south Beirut (the film was shown at the Metropolis Cinema) and at the University of California (Berkeley), where besides presenting the film and exhibition, Maysoon showed and spoke about work by students at Independent Film & Television College in Baghdad.
Posted on 09 Dec 2012
Grant for Iraq photo and video projects
Oxymoron Films has received a grant from Hivos in the Netherlands to be used in projects with Open Shutters and Independent Film & Television College (Baghdad).   The grant will help to support exhibitions of the Open Shutters Iraq photographic work in the Middle East and a women’s video training course in Iraq.
Posted on 05 Nov 2009

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