Wanderer
11min 10 seconds
Synopsis
Wanderer follows Layla Hassan, a young Syrian refugee navigating the UK asylum system in the aftermath of the 2011 Syrian War. Arriving with nothing but a small bag — the last surviving fragment of home — Layla moves through a series of spaces that systematically construct her otherness: a dehumanising asylum interview, a sparse government accommodation block, and a street encounter that exposes the gendered violence of displacement. It is only through her relationship with Sonya, an Iranian-Iraqi refugee living in the same accommodation, that Layla finds a space of genuine recognition — one conducted almost entirely in Arabic, outside the English-speaking structures designed to process them. Structured around a bilingual subtitle framework, Wanderer traces the quiet architecture of alienation: the silence chosen over surrender, the objects that carry identity, and the self that refuses, despite everything, to disappear. |
Artist Statement
Wanderer aimed to make the architecture of identity felt rather than simply observed — tracing not just the stripping away of selfhood alone, but its persistence in the spaces, objects, languages and silences that institutions cannot reach. The film began from the conviction that the longing for home is not exclusive to displacement but is, in different pressures and registers, a universal condition. I chose to explore this through the theme of displacement because it makes visible what many carry quietly: that home is not always a place but can be multiple things: a person, a bag, a language, and its absence one of the most disorienting and alienating things a person can hold. At its heart, Wanderer is about the self that refuses to disappear, and the fragments — an object, a language, another person — in which it survives. This film is produced as part of my practice-based dissertation project.
Basmalah Mahmoud
Basmalah Mahmoud is a filmmaker and writer from Lancaster, UK, working at the intersection of transgressive and autoethnographic cinema. I use my own body and inherited experiences as an Egyptian woman as both subject and formal devices, exploring imposed modesty culture, bodily autonomy and feminist themes through experimental cinematic devices. Her films resist narrative resolution in favour of accumulation and disorientation — pulling viewers into an active, unsettled encounter with the images rather than a passive one. My work focuses on visual poetry, where I blend the line between the written word and cinema.