Bitter with a Shy Taste of Sweetness contrasts the fragmented past of the filmmaker growing up in Baghdad with his surreal California present. Through poetic writing and jarring visuals, the film creates a calm and cruel sense of memory and landscape.
Video Details
2019 | 00:09:00 | United States | English | Color | Stereo | 16:9 | HD video
Video Data Bank is pleased to present the VDB TV program Saif Alsaegh: Bittersweet Landscape. The program features three works by Saif Alsaegh that reflect on landscapes across memory, war-zones, and displacement—1991 (2018), Bitter with a Shy Taste of Sweetness (2019), and Bezuna (2023). Alsaegh is a United States-based filmmaker from Baghdad. Much of his work deals with the contrast between the landscape of his youth in Baghdad growing up as part of the indigenous Chaldean minority in the nineties and early 2000s, and the U.S. landscape where he currently lives. His films have screened in festivals including Cinéma du Réel, Kurzfilm Hamburg, Kassel Dokfest, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, and in galleries and museums including the Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and Rochester Contemporary Art Center. He received his MFA in film from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
"I wanted to represent the contrast of worlds in my life through film, because the experience of these worlds was so visual to me. I couldn’t just film the Iraqi landscape, which I will probably never see again, and anyway I didn’t think that simply filming my life in either place would encompass the contrast I witnessed. I wanted to show on screen the dislocation of diaspora, the vividness of survival, the surreal nature of these experiences, so I never wanted to use normal modes of cinematic representation. I wanted to create moving image poetry with calm and chaotic visuals that make the viewer uncomfortable." — Saif Alsaegh
Read more in our interview VDB Asks... Saif Alsaegh.
This VDB TV program is presented alongside the release of a new title by Alsaegh, The Motherfucker's Birthday.
Featured Titles
Through poetic juxtaposition of the virtual landscape of the phone, the calm landscape of the cabin, and the chaotic landscape of memory, 1991 paints a cruel image of the horror of war and separation.
Bitter with a Shy Taste of Sweetness contrasts the fragmented past of the filmmaker growing up in Baghdad with his surreal California present. Through poetic writing and jarring visuals, the film creates a calm and cruel sense of memory and landscape.
Bezuna explores the complexities of fleeing a war-zone through the analysis of peripheral details. Through interweaving different narratives, the film presents the raw and broken feelings of a child and a cat whose lives will never be the same.