Film Screening and discussion with Arwa Aburawa, Turab Shah and Leena Habiballa
Camden Art Centre and Other Cinemas are pleased to present I Carry It With Me Everywhere, a film screening and discussion between Arwa Aburawa, Turab Shah and Leena Habiballa.
The film exists as a tribute to migrant communities and the deep loss and displacement they face in the search for new ways of being and belonging…
Tracing the lives of multiple characters at moments of rupture, the film seeks to subvert the idea that belonging is always painless. What if a moment of belonging here, in the UK, is also a moment of losing belonging somewhere else? What if that shift also requires giving up a more rooted sense of belonging for a precarious one, one that is always at risk of being taken away? ‘I Carry It With Me Everywhere’ seeks to ask and confront these difficult questions.
The UK government’s antagonistic relationship with migrants forms the quietly simmering backdrop of the film, which is shot in South Kilburn and Harlesden in London. These communities in the borough of Brent are regularly confronted with the harsh reality of this antagonistic policy in the shape of gentrification, the loss of community spaces and the wrongful deportation of Caribbean elders in what became known as the ‘Windrush Scandal’.
Shot in black and white, Aburawa and Shah’s film seeks to convey the timeless and ongoing search for answers to the experience of this (previously existing but newly articulated) ‘hostile environment’. It also seeks to evoke the deeply personal ways that migration plays out across time and space and circumstance whilst also demonstrating the shared sense of loss and belonging at the heart of the migrant experience.
” ‘I Carry It With Me Everywhere’ was made as a tribute to our parents and our grandparents; the first migrants we ever knew. It was made to acknowledge the pain and loss which they were never allowed to articulate in their efforts to be good and, most importantly, grateful migrants. Their pain was something we, as their children, we’re never able to fully understand and this became another layer in the tragedy of migration. This film was an attempt to understand the feeling of loss without knowing the streets and fields, the friendships and family left behind. This film was an attempt at connection and community; something we learnt from watching them build new ways of being and belonging after having to abandon all that they had once held and known” – Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah
With special thanks to the Brent Biennial, Metroland and LUX