thoughts

Working with this video, I took a lot of risks. I’ve never worked with a video camera and green screen before. This animation style was also very new to me. But I knew that I wanted to work with mixed media and incorporate tapes in the video, in some way or another. So I put myself out there and did it. It was challenging and very hard work but I’m so glad I did it anyway.

Walking in to my grandma’s house, I would always see all these stacks of tapes on her shelves. Tapes of old classical arabic music, with really bad sound quality. But that’s perhaps the charm and nostalgic thing about it. Whenever I’m at her house, I see play the tapes. She loves dancing to the music, singing along and suddenly forget all about the age of her body and its limits. It’s like seeing her experience her youthful self again. Like I can almost feel the energy she has and feel what she experiences. How she’s young again and back in Bagdad. She always encourages me to dance along with her, to the music sounds that would make me feel like I’m in all the stories she tells me about. About her young self being in her old dorm in Bagdad, shared with other girls, she went to school with. Stories about all the things she went through when she was younger.

I feel like the tapes represents her and her time back then, so it was important for me to include them in some way, in the video.