Black Palms
Black Palms is an award winning cinema verité short film and ethnographic exploration produced as my senior project. The film functions as a personal memoir, presenting a mosaic of memories that reflect the quiet rituals, contradictions, and nostalgia of expatriate life in the Middle East. It marked my first formal engagement with ethnographic filmmaking and observational documentary practice.
Filmed during the pandemic, the project is shaped by an unusual temporal context that subtly reframes everyday life. This period introduced distance, stillness, and reflection into the work, allowing the film to question what it meant to grow up in Dubai and how memory, place, and identity are shaped by moments of interruption and pause.
Alongside the ten minute film, I produced a ten thousand word written thesis examining cinema verité as a documentary methodology and evaluating its suitability for the project’s subject matter. The research deepened my understanding of observational film and narrative restraint, and played a formative role in refining my documentary approach prior to leading a large scale docuseries with Adidas.
This work extends into a broader interest in cultural and anthropological filmmaking. I have since developed related projects exploring cultural institutions in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and contributed to anthropological film research at the Global Institute for Peace at the University of São Paulo. These experiences continue to inform my interest in producing observational work that sits at the intersection of culture, memory, and lived experience.
