Rebuilding in Miniature is easily one of the true short film highlights from this year's Indy Film Fest, currently going on at Newfields in Midtown Indy, a beautiful setting for such a beautiful film. The film magically shares the story of Ali Alamedy, an Iraqi artist living in Turkey, who creates miniatures scenes from places he has imagined but never actually been. 

Over the course of eight minutes, director Veena Rao poignantly shares Alamedy's story from being born in Karbala, Iraq in 1982 during the height of the Iraq/Iran War to having a father he didn't meet until he was nine-years-old due to the father's imprisonment for political reasons. A reader at an early age, Alamedy turned to creating miniatures to recreate some of those scenes he'd experienced as safety and peace in childhood. 

Making miniatures for less then ten years, Alamedy's creations are nothing short of magnificent. The first miniature, a wooden cottage, was created using ordinary materials and weathered using coffee. Alamedy started his most ambitious and meticulous project, a 19th-century photography studio, only a year after he and his family were forced out of Iraq and landed in Turkey.

Watching Alamedy's process is so completely meditative that one practically forgets the film is in Arabic, Alamedy's work and artistic creations being the ultimate in universal language. 

Balancing personal portrait and artistic expression, Rebuilding in Miniature is one of those films you expect to be ordinary yet it turns out to be extraordinary. 

© Written by Richard Propes
The Independent Critic