Using VHS footage shot by my father and Uncle on their land in the Sahara desert and our home village, I weave a semi-autobiographical story around the images. Centering the voice, I honour the rich tradition of North African oral storytelling kept alive by my great-grandmother and so many others. The desert has always held a mythical place in our family’s consciousness - despite owning land there, there have been many periods in our lives when it’s been inaccessible to us due to colonial occupation and war. It became something we could dream about as a means of transcending our circumstances. Inspired by facts, fictions, myths, mysticism, and the elusiveness of memory, I used the power of dreams to conjure this film in the same way that my family did to manifest apples in the desert.
This was screened as part of the Liverpool Arab Arts Festival programme in July 2023 at the premier of Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah’s fantastic film ‘And still, it remains’ - also shot in the Sahara Desert -, at Wild Solstice, a collective event/exhibition by the Into The Wild 2022 cohort (of which I was part of) at Grow Hackney in June 2022, and at Embodied Fields, a collective screening held at Jamaica Street Studios.
