Roisin Tapponi Introduction
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 South-West-Asia and North-Africa region, Tapponi noticed the need for an streaming service for the best of our regional films, including artist cinema.
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.
Shasha Movies is an SVOD service, which means you sign up to watch a carefully-curated selection of films. The monthly fee helps us to operate totally independently.
Sasha Movies host many events offline, through our Shasha Film Club. Our film clubs occur frequently and globally, and are often accompanied by talks, parties, food.
Shasha Movies focuses on 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. Introducing people globally to hundreds of films from the region, Sasha Movies also aims to solidify SWANA cinema and artist film within the global film and art industries.
Shasha Movies' long-term goals include developing an archival practice, through preservation, restoration, and digitisation, given the lack of film archives in the region. Sasha movies also have pedagogical aims–as it develops a film education through teaching practical skills and film theory, to inspire a next wave in the film industry.