Synopsis

SAMRAA is the grammatically singular, feminine form of the root ‘asmar’, the Arabic word for a contested shade of brown. The term is both a descriptor and a racial designation burdened with historical and social meanings. SAMRAA lives on in unsought nicknames, catcalls, intimacies and absences. It marks the borders of brownness/Blackness, displacing the latter and rendering it palatable. 

Often used as a blunt instrument of political correctness, SAMRAA is the feminine figure distanced from the negative associations which cling to Blackness across the Arab world. SAMRAA is an experimental moving image work which explores this term as a site of both enclosure and endearment. Dita Hashi slices up Arabic pop music videos, live performances and archival footage across space and time, producing a new dissonant soundtrack made up of linguistic reiterations and derivatives. 

SAMRAA evokes this contaminated kinship through sonic manifestations and pelagic yearnings. It defamiliarizes and recontextualizes the asmar’s loose ubiquity. Engaging with the provocations of scholar-critic Hortense Spillers and the poetry of Muhammad al-Fayturi and partly shot on the coast of the Arabian Gulf by essayist, poet, and the film’s creative adviser Momtaza Mehri, SAMRAA elaborates these chromatics of domination. It restages this space of sanitization and disavowal, one which catches the Black woman subject in its tangled net.

Director Biography