Suha Araj

History

SUHA ARAJ Suha Araj creates films that explore the displacement of immigrant communities. The Cup Reader, shot in Palestine, screened at the Tribeca Film Festival and was awarded The Next Great Filmmaker Award at the Berkshire International Film Festival and Baghdad International Film Festival. Araj followed with Pioneer High in 2015. She has received support for her work from the Sundance Film Festival, Torino Film Lab, Independent Filmmaker Project, Berlinale Talent Project Market, Center for Asian American Media and Cine Qua Non Lab. She is the 2018 recipient of Tribeca/Chanel Through Her Lens production funding for her new film Rosa.

Movies

Rosa
Director
While working at her aunt’s flower shop, Rosa takes her job underground when she begins a side business of shipping undocumented bodies to their home countries for burial.
Pioneer High
Director
In January of 1969, seventeen-year-old Hala emigrates with her family from Palestine to Michigan and attends a public high school with a dress code wherein girls cannot wear pants. With her limited grasp of the English language, Hala repeatedly disobeys the rules, wearing pants day after day. Ultimately she unknowingly, or knowingly, starts a revolution in her new school.
The Cup Reader
Writer
Warde, shamed as a young girl yet renowned in Palestine for her mystical seeing and matchmaking lives with her sister Jaleleh and reads the fortunes of her clients. Each woman has made or will make a choice between love and marriage, not having had the luxury of both.
The Cup Reader
Director
Warde, shamed as a young girl yet renowned in Palestine for her mystical seeing and matchmaking lives with her sister Jaleleh and reads the fortunes of her clients. Each woman has made or will make a choice between love and marriage, not having had the luxury of both.