thoughts in transit
Auto-ethnographic non-fiction, video art · 9 min
I started this project with a central question: what happens when your mind, body and heart are in different time zones?
Thoughts in Transit was conceived out of a year-long process of rumination on my movement across four cities; Karachi, Abu Dhabi, Boston and New York.
Using archival footage taken by my friends, family and I, video-calls, footage taken for class assignments, and visual and textual poetry, the film is a reflection on the sights and sounds of the cities inhabited by me during this year. Through a bricolage of chaos and stillness, I try to encapsulate the embodied feelings of each city and how time and space dictate the differences in my gaze.
This project was commissioned by the NYU Abu Dhabi Film and New Media Program through the annual Summer Film Grant. Part of the material used in the Abu Dhabi chapter of the film was shot in Professor Deepak Unnikrishnan's class Today We Wrote Nothing.
Special thanks to Professor Toral Gajarawala for introducing me to the notion of bricolage and its endless possibilities.