Select Short Films and Clips

Shem Tube - “The Enemy”
Bunyore, Kenya

The great Luhya guitarist Shem “Golden Fingers” Tube plays alongside his son and his friends at their home in western Kenya. Part of an ongoing project about guitar music in East Africa.

Camera, audio, and edit by Cyrus Moussavi

Last Crossing of the Yangon River Ferry
Yangon, Burma
For Time Magazine

The final crossings of the famous Yangon River ferry, a symbol of a changing Burma.

Director/Editor: Cyrus Moussavi, Camera: Jacob Russell with Cyrus Moussavi

Nothing Bigger Than Love
Phnom Penh, Cambodia

NOTHING BIGGER THAN LOVE is a film about the Cambodian Vintage Music Archive - បណ្ណសារចម្រៀងជំនាន់ ស៊ីន ស៊ីសាមុត and one collector's fight to preserve the rock music of Cambodia's Golden Age.

Select Screenings:
2018 Festival Cambodge, Lognes, France
2016 Cambodia Town Film Festival, Long Beach, California

Featuring Oum Rotanak Oudom aka ORO
Director: Cyrus Moussavi, Producer: Brittany Nugent, Editor: Joy Davenport.

Celebrating in Heaven
Waterloo, Iowa

Meatpacking plants in the midwest have been hiring Burmese refugees. Karen, Karenni, and Chin migrants, many arriving after more than a decade in camps in Thailand, are the biggest new migrant group in Iowa. An estimated 7,000 refugees of Burma's ongoing civil wars live in the state, mostly drawn by well-paying if strenuous jobs.

Many of the migrants are devout Christians -- a legacy of the zealous Italian and American missionaries who traveled through the mountains of Eastern Burma in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the churches of downtown Waterloo they find social centers and sanctuaries.

Christmas 2015 was overshadowed by the disappearance and death of 17-year-old Moe Sed, who drowned in the Cedar River. But the kindness, generosity, and grace that I admired so much while traveling in eastern Burma made it undiminished to my home state. This short film is one of mourning and celebration told through music.