Full Description
Israeli filmmaker Iris Zaki takes a job as the shampoo girl in a hair salon in Wadi NisNas, Haifa’s lively Christian Arab neighborhood. Zaki elicits stories about history, friendship and small kindnesses as she massages her clients’ scalps and finds glimmers of hope for coexistence in an intimate documentary that is full of heart.
Filmmaker Bio(s)
After several years of working in the Israeli music media industry, Iris moved to London in 2009 and without planning it, she ended up doing a Master’s in documentary filmmaking. Working to pay the rent in the reception of an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish hotel in North London, Iris decided to make her debut film about the place, which resulted in the award-winning short documentary ‘My Kosher Shifts’ (2010). The film had screened worldwide and bought by ethnographic archives and universities. In 2013 Iris commenced a practice-based PhD in documentary filmmaking, supervised by the noted British documentarist Marc Isaacs. Her research explores her own innovative documentary filmmaking technique, focusing on closed-communities.
