APPROACH

ERASURE & RECONSTRUCTION

Beneath a Mother’s Feet is not a straightforward retelling, but a reconstruction of the past. Some elements came directly from what was handed down to me. These include my mother’s wedding portrait, with her husband’s face scribbled out in black biro, later reconstructed and placed into the film. Other fragments emerged through family stories: a conversation around the dinner table, Wedad embroidering at home, the act of selling her dowry gold.

Other moments arrived through memory shaped by imagination and dreams. One such image is her waking to find her hands stained with henna, something my mother claimed to have experienced both as a child and again many years later, surrounded by superstition and the lingering presence of the djinn. These stories remind me that the metaphysical has always existed alongside the everyday, informing how people understand their lives and make meaning of what cannot be easily explained.

Some things were erased deliberately, others lost to time, and many never spoken aloud. To reach toward these absences, I combined fragments with invention. I worked with both professional and non professional actors, inviting them to inhabit their roles through improvisation and personal identification. The use of surreal elements allowed me to suggest what language could not fully articulate: the weight of feeling, the texture of fear or longing, and the presence of forces that resist rational explanation.

The film is shaped as much by what remains as by what is missing. It does not attempt to restore every detail, but instead stays with the truths that surface in the spaces between memory and forgetting, silence and testimony, loss and invention.