Negotiating Liberation: Don't Be a Dream, Please Be Real 2021

The film is a meditative visual of the African Immigrant experience in Dubai. A story of Black love in a shifting universe. It touches on the idea of the spirit of the United Arab Emirates as a new metropolis being built and that too on its own new terms of capitalism and the eternal chasing of ‘a new world’, of dreams. More so I explore how as Africans we have turned our gaze to this Eastern nugget of the modern world and no longer that of typical Western ideals of where we can go to achieve our dreams. Dreams that our often complicated governments fail to allow us to fulfil in their entirety, back home. This is a commissioned short for the Goethe Institut Abu Dhabi.

To watch all short films in the Pachedu strand together, click here.