Tsawwar… Thana Faroq

Imagine Me Like a Country of Love

“Imagine Me Like a Country of Love is an experimental short film that explores the emotional and physical landscapes of returning to a homeland transformed by time and conflict. Through a blend of contemporary footage from Yemen, recovered archival family photographs, and animation, the film unfolds as a fragmented, poetic reflection on memory, belonging, and grief.

Inspired by my own return to Yemen after nearly a decade away, the film asks what happens when the memories we left behind are disturbed. With the help of my mother, I recovered family photographs once thought lost during the war—images that now serve as a visual thread through the narrative.

The film moves like memory itself: disjointed, layered, and uncertain. It is a meditation on the dissonance of return and the aftermath of conflict, not in its visible ruins, but in what remains quietly unsettled.”

ThanaFaroq is a Yemeni-born photographer, writer, and educator living in the Netherlands. Her multidisciplinary practice spans photography, text, and moving images, exploring the intersections of memory, migration, and intergenerational trauma. Deeply rooted in her own experience of migration, Faroq’s work navigates the emotional and psychological landscapes of displacement, highlighting women’s resilience and the complex, often contradictory process of constructing belonging in post-disaster contexts.

Her practice has been widely exhibited and supported by the Mondriaan Fonds, AFAC, DohaFilmInstitute, and the OpenSocietyFoundation. Her photobooks I Don’t Recognize Me in the Shadows (2020) and How Shall We Greet the Sun (2023) have received international acclaim, and her work has been shown at festivals including Copenhagen Photo Festival, BredaPhoto, and Photoville (New York).

Tsawwar is an ongoing visual series in Daftar which explores the stories behind a photograph, taken in the region or by an Arab photographer, written in their own words.