As the founder of Shasha Movies, the world’s first streaming service dedicated to SWANA cinema, Róisín Tapponi is creating a trove of underrepresented films
This article is taken from the Spring/Summer 2025 issue of AnOther Magazine:
“With my streaming platform, Shasha, I want to show the richness of Southwest Asian and North African, or SWANA, cinema – often considered ‘niche’ despite more than a century of film history. It’s an organic process – if I’m at a party in Tunis, say, I’ll ask a friend to introduce me to the filmmakers in the room. I’ve always worked closely with directors and artists in Palestine – Noor Abed, who weaves folklore and mythmaking into her work, is someone I’ve screened often. In her haunting Super 8 film Our Songs Were Ready for All Wars to Come [2021], a group of women perform Palestinian folk songs and ritualistic acts to source water. Without plot or dialogue, Noor evokes the magical and mythic wellsprings of oral storytelling in the region in a truly beautiful way. Another innovative artist whose work Shasha has shown is Basma al-Sharif – the way she explores disembodiment and the alienation of the body through exile is genius. In her film Home Movies Gaza [2013], shot in the Gaza Strip, there’s a poignant scene where her cousin is at home practising the cello and trying to drown out the constant noise and buzz of drones in the background. Basma’s films don’t have the sensational images that war photographers tend to document – a crying child, a bomb. They evade representation, which links to the nature of colonialism as structural, not an event. These films are masterful and they deserve to be watched globally. And because Shasha is independent – no sponsors, no investors – and free from censorship, we spotlight many films that can’t be screened offline in the region.”
As a teenager growing up in rural Ireland, the Iraqi-Irish curator and writer Róisín Tapponi made nightly escapes into arthouse cinema – Cassavetes, Fassbinder, Godard and more – noting each film in an ever-expanding log she still keeps. It was so rare to see her own heritage represented in the annals of arthouse that, in 2018, the politically engaged cinephile launched Habibi Collective, a platform devoted to amplifying women-led film from the SWANA region. Today, the 25-year-old is based in London and the founder of Shasha Movies, the world’s first streaming service dedicated to SWANA cinema. An uncompromising grassroots initiative built from scratch, Shasha (‘screen’ in Arabic) is a trove of unsung gems, encompassing subversive video art, queer Egyptian vampire horrors, sci-fi shorts, forgotten new wave masterpieces and Turksploitation neo-noirs. Passionate about forging connections and community, Tapponi also holds monthly film clubs in Marrakech and Baghdad — exuberant evenings of film, food, music and conversation — and hosts the Shasha podcast, sharing the stories of revolutionary film collectives. She has brought her incisive curatorial eye to programmes for the likes of MoMA and Frieze; lectured at Oxford, Columbia and UC Berkeley; and in 2023 appeared in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for her indefatigable work supporting underrepresented film talent.
Hand-printing: Merrick d’Arcy-Irvine
This story features in the Spring/Summer 2025 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale now.
