Video Plays
"The Four Hijabs" is an animated short film that explores the multiple meanings of four hijabs mentioned in 16 Qur'anic verses and interprets them through Arab Muslim feminist lenses.
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"Meet Mosque Alert" is a compilation of content created in Steps 1 through 4 of Jamil Khoury's 9-Step new play development and civic engagement process. Mosque Alert tells the story of two suburban American families living in Naperville, IL—one Christian, the other Muslim—who find their lives torn apart by a proposal to build a new mosque in their community.
Read MoreA thought-provoking and often-humorous reflection on the theoretical and practical differences between two powerful social ideas: multiculturalism and polyculturalism.
Read MoreSacred Stages: A Church, A Theatre, and A Story (28min, 37sec), tells the unique and inspiring story of the relationship between the First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple—Chicago's oldest Christian congregation—and Silk Road Rising, a theatre company founded in response to 9/11 and dedicated to showcasing playwrights of Asian and Middle Eastern backgrounds. A shared commitment to storytelling, racial and economic justice, and LGBT inclusion characterizes this profound partnership between a religious community and a secular theatre.
Read More"The Balancing Arab" tells the story of Heidi (played by Leslie Frame), an Irish American personal fitness trainer, and Hanan (played by Amira Sabbagh), her once morbidly obese Arab American client. Set in a downtown Chicago gym amidst a strenuous training session, the mood turns tense as the two women recount an event at the Arab American Cultural Center a few nights earlier, an event at which the evening’s political discourse got filtered through decidedly different lenses.
Read MoreSilk Road Rising's "Not Quite White: Arabs, Slavs, and the Contours of Contested Whiteness" (24 min, 8 sec), directed by Jamil Khoury and Stephen Combs, is a documentary film that explores the complicated relationship of Arab and Slavic immigrants to American notions of whiteness.
Read More"both/and" breaks the shackles of "either/or" in this semi-autobiographical short video play by Jamil Khoury. In "both/and," the characters of Jamil, Arab Man, and Gay Man explore and explode the constructed borders between American and Arab, Arab American and gay, for profit and not for profit, and assorted other disputed territories.
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