"Negotiating Liberation" Dreamlovers: Wistful AfroRomantics in Emirati 16mm

Amirah Tajdin’s short "Negotiating Liberation" is almost entirely set to music and could be experienced at first glance as a gorgeously framed music video, foregrounding technicolor fashions and delectable pastries. 

By Bilal Qureshi

But what may initially present itself as a sultry dance between its two beautiful black leads is deeply embedded in Tajdin’s own experience as an African woman artist living and working in Dubai, toggling between commercial video and her own practice as an art filmmaker. The music of the lovers on screen is a melancholic exploration of how the very act of expressing private love is a form of quiet rebellion against the loneliness of immigrant life outside one’s home country. The setting is an unfinished Dubai villa, its arches and bare walls becoming the architecture of the ultimate migrant dream in a city defined by the pursuit of personal property and sun-kissed luxury. In centering the story on two young African migrants, reuniting after a long separation, Tajdin draws on her vocabulary of fashion and music to flesh out the pleasure principle of migrant life "after hours". While realism and documentary may be two modes to explore the tiered nuance of the black migrant experience in the Gulf, Tajdin focuses on dance, interwoven bodies and live performance, for she also sees those as a central part of the immigrant experience. Emotional moments of reprieve walled off from the Sunday-Thursday struggle are as hard-won and deserving of celebration as the economic advances and choices that fuel migrant life. Shot on 16mm film stock overlayed with occasional text messages, the piece pays tribute to the 1960s African High-Life movement and the colors and songs of Tajdin’s native Kenya. The resulting piece is a film of unapologetic beauty and black love created entirely on location in the Gulf, a private dance enacted in a dreamy Dubai home.  

BQ: Tell me about the brief for this project and what it prompted you to think?  

Amirah: The commission came last summer after the charged Black Lives Matters uprising of 2020, which did ripple into this city, surprisingly. It was nice to see racial politics being vocalized and actually supported here by institutes like Goethe. It came after a time when I’d done a bit of commercial work after the lockdown and was a bit drained so it was a lovely artistic outlet to make video art. The commissioner gave me full creative freedom but the only thing he did say was that he loved the African bands who play in Dubai and that he’d love to have them featured in some form. Given that my work does revolve around music a lot, it was an easy fit. I was also at that point and season where I really did want to do something to do with love and something a bit more light, even cute. That said, there’s also an underlying melancholia that also comes through at the end, which speaks to the reality of the immigrant experience whether it’s here or anywhere else in the world. 

BQ: Your characters are in this villa in the city that you later zoom out from, and the broader context where they are is less evident in the beginning. Tell me about the place where you filmed it and the way the architecture shaped the way you told the story. 

Amirah: The setting was the biggest part of the treatment when I was writing the script. I wanted it to be a half-built villa because it’s a metaphor for the fact that we come out here as African immigrants to build our dreams and better futures away from our corrupt, war-torn countries and all the tropes of African countries we have to survive. But do you ever actually get to live in your dream home? What does that look like and what does that mean? I did want to set it in a grand, very Khaleeji looking villa. I wanted it to be suburbia, and it’s a neighborhood called Khawaneej, which is a very local Emirati neighborhood. It’s on the outskirts of the city and it’s become a safe enclave where the locals can hold onto their identity and not feel so exposed to the expatriates or the more common suburbs like Jumeirah. It was interesting to drive around that neighborhood and we spent eight weeks looking. We were delighted when the owner of this house said yes, he did have the Arabesque touches to the villa and it was just the right amount of half-built. I really wanted to have that harsh aesthetic of unpainted bricks against these regal characters who exist in this world. 

BQ: One of the things I enjoyed was that while the film is rooted in Dubai, it has this otherworldly, dreamy tone. A lot of this migrant storytelling is so realist and so influenced by news and documentaries, so the fact that this was a bit more surreal and dreamlike offered a different way of telling that story. When this theme around migrant off-hours life in Dubai was suggested, given that this is a complicated subject and there’s a lot of complexity around telling this story, were there tropes you were personally trying to avoid in your storytelling?  

Amirah: Yes, for sure. The idea stemmed from my own nights out with the band that’s in the film called Lesasa Jocker & Bilenge Musica Band. Unfortunately, we couldn’t shoot with them because they’ve been stuck in Kenya since the pandemic started. The dream would have been to have them playing live in the villa and us shooting this couple engaging with them and dancing near them but it ended up being a projection and a remote shoot with them in Nairobi. That said, it was inspired by this question of where do you go on a Friday night to find joy when you’ve been chasing your dream from Sunday through Thursday. It’s also that age-old thing of black people who love to look good – in South Africa and America, for example, where there were racially charged reasons to making sure you looked good and you had your Church or Sunday best in America, for example. What does that look like now in a 2021 aesthetic? How do we dress up to the nines, go out dancing, and just celebrate that joy? Because I could have easily made a sad story about African immigrants who just can’t make it in the city. The truth is you don’t know if you’re going to make it here or not but what happens in between? I wanted to focus on that in-between time and to capture what it looks like, what it feels like, what it sounds like. But what happened when I got to the edit was that I felt there was more there with what the actors brought to the screen. It was their longing for the people you’re apart from. In Dubai, there’s also this spousal thing where you can’t necessarily be here at the same time. One of the spouses will often come here earlier, no matter the income bracket. I thought it was interesting to play with that and to have the woman character be here first, as opposed to the man, and he comes after two years to see her and he hasn’t seen his wife in two years. It becomes the night where I’m about to see my love after so long. This is from my own memories of growing up between Kenya, Oman, and Dubai. There was one time when we were in Oman with my mom, and dad was still back in Kenya and he came a little later and it was this whole surprise that our aunts planned for them to be reunited. I just remember seeing that interaction between my parents after being apart for so long in an immigrant context. It was that sweet, shy moment of seeing your love after so long. For me the film was about those little moments rather than big, grand humanist themes of immigrant sadness and depression, which are of course always important, but I didn’t want to go into that for this piece specifically. It’s interesting that it still managed to sneak through, regardless. 

BQ: I want to ask you about being an African artist yourself based in Dubai, yourself leading that composite experience the series is exploring. After so many years here, do you feel this city has shifted your storytelling style, aesthetic, your filmmaking sensibility in such a way that your art is specifically imprinted with this place? 

Amirah: Definitely. Over the years, Dubai has always been a feature in my creative journey, both as a working director over the past ten years and as a teenager when I made the decision to become a filmmaker. It’s interesting because Dubai is this city that’s building its own version of capitalism and it’s a city where so many people come to achieve their dreams. Maybe it’s like New York in the 20s or early 1900s, where you just make your own rules and people are open to it because you’re all part of building the fabric of a new city. As a black female director, I’ve been allowed and afforded directorial jobs that I could not dream of getting as a working director elsewhere. There is a level of not being racialized first. It is truly about your talent first and I think that’s super rare as a working creative anywhere in the world, where you feel like you’re ticking diversity boxes or representation boxes. You truly believe in your self-worth as a creative. I now have representation in Europe and America and sometimes I wonder whether I’m a token in those rosters or am I there for my work? But I can safely say I know I’m there for my work and not for ticking boxes because I started in this city first.