Alshaibi’s “Profane” bows at Boston Underground

Manal Kara in “Profane”

USAMA ALSHAIBI’S button-pushing feature “Profane,” starring Manal Kara, as a devout Muslim dominatrix, has its U.S. premiere March 26 and 29 at the Boston Underground Film Festival. 

Alshaibi made the personal Iraq documentary “Nice Bombs” and is working on the Kartemquin doc “American Arab.”  

Charges are pending in a March 6 incident in which Alshaibi alleged that he was beaten and called racial slurs after wandering into a party in Fairfield, Iowa, where he moved last summer.

ERIC MATTSON of EZ’s Plan Productions is in postproduction on the art house film Julie’s Smile, starring Stacie Barra as “a gentle, peaceful woman… who slowly loses her grip on reality and struggles to get it back,” Mattson says.  

Featuring A. Monnie Aleahmad, Nina Trader, Jimmy Shay, DP/coproducer Derek Braasch, UPM Becky Crawford and Bud Revall.  They shot last summer in the Southwest suburbs, and expect to finish post this spring.

DION AND SUSAN STROWHORN of 9×18 Productions have launched the Midwest Christian Inspirational Film Festival, to showcase “inspiring, uplifting and innovative” films “of Christian and inspiration genre that reflect faith, hope, motivational and positive images.”  

May 1 is the early submission deadline for the festival, which is slated to debut in September.  9×18 produced the films “The Concert,” “Overcome” and “Number 37.”  

Kurtis GnageyWRITER/DIRECTOR KURTIS GNAGEY, producer Elvis Kunesh, and DP Thomas Cameron shoot the 35mm 10-minute Western “Pancha” in late April.  

“The film is a modern-day Western told from the eyes of neighborhood children and follows the adventures of Pancha, a nine-year-old Latin American girl with big dreams of being the baddest outlaw in the Wild West,” Kunesh says.  

The three filmmakers made the 10-part web series “The Windy City.”  

Lawrence Lee WallaceLAWRENCE LEE WALLACE of Deep Productions Studios is developing the women’s ensemble comedy “The Girls,” which he describes as “Meet the Parents meets Sex in the City.”  

“In 2009 my romantic comedy ‘If You Love Me’ [was] about four men whose relationships have all tanked at the same time and come together to try to figure out how to fix them,” Wallace says.  

“I’m looking to do another film similar to that but with a mostly female cast this time.”

APRIL 3 is the early submission deadline for The Englewood Film Festival, which runs in October.  

The festival is produced by Mark Harris of 1555 Filmworks, producer of Ricardo Islas’s in-production “Frankenstein: Day of the Beast” and Christopher Nolen’s in-development “The Good Life.”

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