The Motherfucker’s Birthday (2024)
Saif Alsaegh
The Motherfucker’s Birthday, Saif Alsaegh, Iraq/USA, digital, 7 min, 2024
Through dancing, The Motherfucker’s Birthday shows the evil of the dictator and the horror people endure under powerful political leaders. The film presents dancing, a universal and uniquely human activity often representing joy, with eerie footage of Saddam Hussein and his sons’ torture tools while they dance. George Bush also dances with a smirk across the screen while announcing a war that would destabilize a whole region. Contrasting the dancing of these powerful men—who seem disturbingly unconcerned with the lives they impact—with the dancing of the people of Iraq amplifies the fear, control, and horror the general public lives under. Everything becomes a gesture of dance—the torture, the hesitant political humour, and the war. Everyone becomes a dancer—the dictator and the oppressed performing a distorted version of this human act. Saddam dances, Bush dances—so what’s left for the Iraqi people except to join in?
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with Video Data Bank.
Image credits: all artworks, portraits, and stills courtesy Video Data Bank © Saif Alsaegh.
About the artist
Saif Alsaegh (Iraq/USA) is a filmmaker born in Baghdad in 1991. His work deals with the contrast between the landscape of his youth in Iraq growing up as part of the indigenous Chaldean minority in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the US landscape where he currently lives. After completing undergraduate studies in journalism in Iraq, he relocated to the USA and received an MFA in Film, Video, Animation and New Genres from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2019). His previous films, such as Bezuna (2023), 1991 (2018), and Motorola Jockeys (2016), have screened in festivals and venues worldwide including Cairo Video Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Visions du Reél, Spectacle Theater, Fronteira Film Festival, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, Kassel Dokfest, and Aesthetica Short Film Festival, winning awards from Cinéma du Réel and Athens International Film and Video Festival, among others. He has undertaken residencies at Echo Park Film Center (Los Angeles), Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Center (Buffalo) and was a 2021 Flaherty Film Seminar Professional Development Fellow. His volume of poetry Iraqi Headaches was published in 2013. He lives and works in Los Angeles, where he is a lecturer at California State University, Fullerton.