#PAGTIC-LA
Hanina/Homesick
HOME IS A PLACE INSIDE US
A young Nubian girl embarks on a journey back in time to reconnect with her drowned homeland. Guided by the Nile egret, she travels underwater within the lake created by Egypt's Aswan High Dam to visit Nubia's mountains and palm trees, water wheels and houses, men and women. She bids farewell to her people as they board the boats that will take them to their resettlement villages. Returning to her own time, she carries the strength of knowing that Nubia will always live on inside her.
Writer/Director
Yasmin Moll
Yasmin Moll is an ethnographic filmmaker. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from New York University and is a graduate of its renowned Culture and Media program in ethnographic film theory and production. Yasmin grew up in Egypt and currently lives in the US, where she is a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan.
Director Statement
In 1964, the lake created by the Aswan High Dam led to the largest displacement in modern Egyptian history as Nubians were forced to leave their villages along the bank of the Nile. In the years immediately preceding construction of the dam, hundreds of photos of “Old Nubia” were taken as part of a large-scale project of salvage anthropology directed by the American University in Cairo.
The animated film Hanina/Homesick re-imagines these ethnographic photos as a visual accompaniment to the iconic displacement song “Wa Hanina,” written and performed by the late musician Sayed Gayer and re-arranged and recorded for this project by his son Ahmed.
My maternal family is from the Kenuz village of East Kushtmna. I grew up within the Nubian community in Cairo listening to stories and songs about “Old Nubia” even though my family had been calling the capital city home for decades. Still, Nubians have kept the memory of our lost homeland through cultivating a loving yearning or hanin, for Nubia across generations. By blurring the boundaries between art and documentation to give memories moving form, Homesick participates in Nubian traditions of nostalgic storytelling as historical witnessing while recasting salvage anthropology as a sentimental archive.
