ABOUT US

Founded in 2020, Shasha Movies is the independent streaming service for South-West Asian and North African (SWANA) cinema. We aim to formalise the space for artist film in and around the region, and present a carefully-curated selection of exclusive films to a global audience. Shasha Movies is owned and operated completely independently, by a small team of women from SWANA. All films are available in original language with English subtitles. Films are available to watch by all, anywhere in the world.

OUR STORY

Shasha Movies was launched by Róisín Tapponi, an Assyrian Iraqi & Irish film programmer, writer and PhD scholar. Since she founded Habibi Collective in 2016, a community platform supporting women’s film and video practice from SWANA, Tapponi noticed the need for an streaming service for the best of our regional films, including artist cinema. After a successful crowdfunding campaign, Shasha Movies launched to eager supporters and cinephiles all over the world.

Each team member is incredibly active on the ground in the region, and present in both global film and art industries. Shasha Movies builds meaningful and long-lasting relationships with filmmakers and artists, supporting immensely behind-the-scenes and strategizing with them to develop a quality distribution plan across the film and art industries.

For her work with Shasha Movies, Tapponi was honoured in Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe 2023.

HOW WE WORK

Shasha Movies is an SVOD service, which means you sign up to watch a carefully-curated selection of films. The small monthly fee you pay helps us to operate totally independently. Importantly, we host many events offline, through our Shasha Film Club. Our film clubs occur frequently and globally, and are often accompanied by talks, parties, food–or all the above!

We also offer institutional subscriptions, please contact us for more information.

OUR AIMS

At Shasha Movies, our centre is not whiteness. In the global independent film industry, SWANA cinema is often considered a ‘niche’, despite almost a century of film history in our region. We want as many people as possible from our community to become excited by our cinema. Introducing people globally to hundreds of incredible films from our region, we also aim to solidify SWANA cinema and artist film within the global film and art industries.

Due to our operating independently, and thus our lack of censorship, we spotlight many films that cannot be screened offline in the region. We are a queer-friendly and pro-Palestinian team, and actively support filmmakers who have traditionally been marginalised. This includes supporting filmmakers who have difficulties accessing the film festival circuit, obtaining a distributor, or who do not have the necessary industry connections.

As a team of young people, we are the future of cinema. We are figuring out how that looks in terms of new technology, which we will continue experimenting with and integrating into the service. It is really important to acknowledge that Shasha Movies is custom-made, and does not rely on any Silicon Valley hosting or embed services. There is so much discourse on the politics of space offline, which rarely translates online. We are interested in structural change, even over issues of representation.

Our long-term goals include developing an archival practice, through preservation, restoration, and digitisation, given the lack of film archives in the region. We also have pedagogical aims–we want to develop a film education through teaching practical skills and film theory, to inspire a next wave in our film industry.