Jaddoland

A visit to her mother’s home art studio in Texas prompts artist and filmmaker Nadia Shihab to explore the meaning of home and the search for belonging across three generations of her Iraqi family.

Jaddoland explores the meaning of home and the search for belonging across generations. When filmmaker Nadia Shihab returns to her hometown in the Texas panhandle to visit her mother, an artist from Iraq, she turns her lens on her mother’s increasingly isolated life, as well as the beauty and solace that emerge through her creative process. Soon, the filmmaker’s charismatic grandfather arrives from Iraq, prompting Nadia on a deeper search to understand her own roots and connections to the places she calls home.

Nadia Shihab is an artist whose films (JADDOLAND, AMAL'S GARDEN, and I COME FROM IRAQ) draw on her interest in personal migratory narratives with a concern for the unseen – spaces of alienation, states of absence, the condition of dislocation – and the ways in which the unnoticed can be intimated and rendered visible.