Habibi Rasak Kharban (My Darling, Something's Wrong With Your Head) is a digital feature film project that is a modern retelling of the classical Arabo-Islamic tragic romance Majnun Layla.

The narrative feature is the first to be made in Gaza in over 10 years.

The Habibi Project serves as a bridge for understanding contemporary conflict, and as an illumination of the multi-textured character of Islamic civilization. The famous Sufi Islamic mystical parable Majnun Layla will be set in modern-day Khan Younis Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip to depict Islamic civilization and understand its problems today.

Majnun Layla is one of the most popular love stories of the Islamic world. It centers on the undying quest for love and is more of a phenomenon than it is a text. Pre-dating Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the Arabo-Islamic oral narrative was first recorded by Ibn Qutayba in the 9th century; today there are many versions of this epic story, including Arabic, Persian, Indian, Turkish, and Russian versions that date from the 9th to the 21st centuries.

Majnun Layla tells the story of Qays who is driven mad by his love for Layla. Qays was nicknamed Majnun (Madman) since his reason had left him because of the intensity of his passion. Sufis adopted the story, taking Layla as a metaphor for God. Majnun's tragic, self-sacrificing, ambivalent search for Layla/God—in a situation where both seem unattainable to experience—is where our story picks up in Gaza City in September 2001.


Project Status

I spent Spring 2005 in pre-production in Khan Younis working with Palestinian theater director, Mohammed Hamdan, who co-produced and appeared in my documentary Forbidden to Wander. I shot a work sample that served as an experiment of the feasibility of my project.

The Habibi Project is fiscally sponsored by Women Make Movies and supported by a Fulbright Research Grant, a Jerome Foundation Grant, the Rooftop Filmmakers' Fund, the Paul Robeson Fund, and the Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund. Donors to the project include Richard Linklater, Gaza Media Center, and hundreds of other generous individuals. Project Advisor is Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now) and Contributing Cinematographer is James Longley (Iraq in Fragments). Paul James Raval will shoot the feature film.

I currently raise money to support production costs.