Collective Visions

Interview with Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah

Public spaces are never anonymous. Even at their most unassuming and superficially nondescript, their presence is that of an omnipresent force, an active witness molded by the lives that pass it by. But that doesn’t imply neutrality. By definition, the public space is political, the etymology of the latter being literally “relating to public life”. How public that life is, is defined within the constitution of each space. How accessible is it? How is it experienced? What laws govern it? Those are some of the questions that guide the work of filmmaking duo Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah, and their film exhibition project Other Cinemas.

They each already had a practice as independent filmmakers before their creative and political interests made them align and start working collaboratively, which they’ve maintained since 2019. Other Cinemas began as a community screening initiative in the London Borough of Brent, one of the most ethnically diverse areas in the United Kingdom, with a 2021 census estimating that nearly 44% of the population were born outside of the UK. The mutation of geographies through immigration and cultural diversity brings with it the promise of resigning official histories, which is at the heart of both Other Cinemas’ activity and Aburawa and Shah’s cinematic inquiries.

With the former, they look to make political and radical films accessible to communities beyond Central London and establish a bridge for local audiences to engage with these works outside of the rigid and sometimes alienating hierarchies inherent to institutional contexts. As a filmmaking duo, their work channels that communal practice into an ongoing series of creative inquiries regarding what they refer to as the “colonial continuum”. In our interview, we discuss questions such as “How do you visualise slow violence? How do you visualise toxic colonialism?”

After all, the filmmakers are dealing with spectres, vicious entities whose impact is “deeply felt but often invisible”. In order to properly engage with them, the work has to bypass another type of hierarchy: the visual one. “On the one hand, these histories need to be acknowledged. On the other, why must everything be visually captured if people already feel, understand, and live with these realities? That tension runs throughout our films”, Aburawa explains.

In I Carry It With Me Everywhere (2022), the filmmakers merge fictionalised testimonies of first-generation UK migrants with lyrical, black-and-white imagery of daily life in Brent to create an affective tapestry around the elusive notion of “belonging”. And Still, It Remains (2024) takes the history of French nuclear testing in a former colony and essentially forgoes visual depiction of anything beyond the transfixing desert landscapes around the Hoggar Mountains in Algeria, evoking primordial aural forces by recreating the sensory experience of those who inhabit that specific community. The Park (Dancing on the Rubble of Empire) (2025) playfully intersects musings regarding one of the many dark pages of British colonial history in Wembley Park with intervened archival material and emergent meditations on how the titular park continues to be actively reclaimed as a public space.

Just by describing the concepts running throughout Aburawa and Shah’s short works, it becomes clear that juxtaposition is a constant. A common place that arises even in decolonial film has to do with approaching colonial violence from a retrospective lens, an act of cinematic archeology where light is shone on willingly obscured corners of Imperial History. The reverberations of that violence, however, are still in the present tense, even beyond causality. These structures raised the pillars of Western society, and despite the messaging being less overt, their specter still looms. Aburawa and Shah purposely look at lived-in spaces, at the contradictions of public life, where new communities are created, sometimes literally on top of the vestiges of exploited bodies, the settled dust of environmental collapse, and the harrowing echoes of those whose remarks were never heard or acknowledged. Dark histories linger and cohabit with the primal need of community. The ethereal warmth of familiarity and collaboration then morphs into palpable, political spaces.

What the audiovisual form allows is to explore this tension by withholding context, actively refusing certain visual representations the audience might expect, and letting that decision be felt as an opportunity for reflection. “We’re constantly trying to find ways for film to redact and create productive discomfort. Rather than simply presenting images for consumption, we’re interested in asking viewers to sit with absence”, Shah expresses. Each cinematic layer is part of the same composition, but there’s something uncanny about their positioning, which requires active engagement to pursue that curiosity.

I Carry It With Me Everywhere (Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah, 2022)

Aburawa and Shah’s films seek to reposition the loaded history behind the film camera, which, in and of itself, was a colonial tool used to extract landscapes and customs and present them under the veneer of anthropological interest. The forms of filmmaking come from the era of agonising empires and their delirious displays of geopolitical weight. If left unquestioned, their inherited violence endures. “Film education has often reproduced that colonial gaze, and so part of our work involves unlearning those traditions,” adds Aburawa.

How can such cemented and rigid structures be subverted when their forms present themselves as unequivocal truths, not too distant from the positivist fascination with the “scientific method”? Just as the latter, the facade of objectivity becomes a subconscious reproduction; not a moustache-twirling, chauvinistic power, but stealthily exclusionary practices advertising “industry standards”. According to Shah, subverting the latter is “an ongoing process guided by our relationships with the people who appear in our films”.

That’s why, despite being recognisably part of the same political thrust, each of Aburawa’s and Shah’s films takes a different formal approach, as a result of a conversation with the people whose lives become its guiding structure. In And Still, It Remains, the rural Algerian community’s perception of time is an extension of the elemental. It cannot start with a correlation with French colonial violence and its pollution of the desert, as the sands have been there for thousands of years. Assumptions are constantly questioned by engaging filmmaking as a dialogue. “Sometimes that’s less about representing information than trying to communicate a feeling,” as Aburawa puts it. That’s when sound, direct animation, textures and even abstraction make it into the films, as they gesture towards feelings that can’t be contained by words nor traditional depiction. “For us, the ethics behind filmmaking are often more important than what the finished film ultimately looks like.”

In the case of The Park, that meant avoiding a preconceived visual identity for the area and building on its emergent and sometimes erratic pace and atmosphere, where voices intersect, tones and accents collide, and there’s an intimate look into the faces that make it a community. After all, in contrast to the Algerian village of Ekker, Brent is the filmmakers’ community, so they show confidence in positioning themselves directly as active agents within it. What the camera shows—the picnics, people sitting in the grass and spending time together—is also their lived relationship with this space. “None of our films are simply our vision. They’re collective visions. The form changes from project to project, but the guiding question is always: what do the people in this film want to communicate?”

I Carry It With Me Everywhere is all about timelessness and refractions of time, how stories unfold through different periods as one continuous reality. The digital monochrome approach precisely highlights that temporal ambiguity and contradiction. There’s the visual association with memories and “the past”, but the register isn’t aiming to hide its contemporary placing; it unsettles the viewer’s sense of time, but never its sense of place. Music, voice-over, soundscapes: they are all extensions of these interior lives we’re following. The stories being told are always happening; they coexist, and the community of Brent has always been there, witnessing.

As the opening text of The Park says: “Things which are unsaid, unheard and unarchived still exist”. That’s how Aburawa and Shah think about colonial history, as the stories that are already within the public space. There’s no need to invent or formulate, only to listen to the people already feeling history. As Aburawa puts it: “Our films are not re-signifying the landscape. We’re making visible—or perhaps audible—something that already exists beneath the surface. Colonialism underpins so many aspects of contemporary life. Even moments of joy in a park are shaped by those histories.”

In the same film, one of the testimonies describes colonial violence as “underlyingly, you always know it’s there.” It might not be fully understood or articulated. The details might be elusive, and yet, its presence is tangible. Aburawa and Shah’s films are simply trying to give them an audiovisual form through collective praxis, and then beg the question of what happens when that history is finally acknowledged. What happens then? What changes? As they reflect: “Filmmaking becomes a communal way of working through those questions rather than trying to answer them alone.”