Make a film about me you said
and I said
Yes

For seven years, we stayed in each other’s orbit

And then one day, you stopped answering my messages

You disappeared

Tell me, how do I start?

I’m here now, even though you are not

It could be as if you were here too

As if we could have a conversation

Tell me two things:

1. How do I start?
2. How do you end?

From Impermanent Passage

The Swimmer

Feature film, production/post-production

Impermanent Passage

Nonfiction book, in progress

After a perilous journey from Pakistan, a young asylum seeker ends up in Northern Europe. He is Hazara, originally from Afghanistan, raised in Quetta, with a piece of shrapnel embedded in his leg from a bombing that killed his best friend. We can call him Arash. He wants to be a photographer. As an aspiring competitive swimmer, he dreams of representing Sweden in the Olympics. During his first summer in Sweden, at a makeshift camp for young asylum seekers housed in a repurposed hotel, Arash meets artist and nonfiction filmmaker Sara Jordenö. He asks her to tell his story. She says yes.

For Arash, his lived experience becomes a form of currency. Moving through asylum, migration, and border control, his life is translated into legal categories, administrative language, and judgment. Each telling of his story carries enormous consequences for his future. Eventually, the border no longer operates only at the edge of a territory. It has become something he has to carry in his body, something he cannot escape.

One day, somewhere in Europe, he disappears.

The Swimmer and Impermanent Passage begin from that disappearance, and from the unfinished promise of film and text. Together, the film and the book explore useful fiction: the act of proceeding as if the conversation can continue; as if performance can open a space for testimony, memory, and unanswered questions; as if cinema and writing might still answer the promise that began the work.

Working with cinematographers Nina Zehri and Maja Dennhag, The Swimmer develops a surreal and tactile cinema of dislocation: a visual language of temporary rooms and landscapes, shaped by the logic of memory and hallucination. The film traces the contours of what nonfiction can be when the person it is addressing is absent, and when reconstruction, embodiment, and imagination become methods of accountability.

Impermanent Passage uses the form of the lyric essay, moving between theory and poetry, literature and film writing. The book brings together memoir, testimony, research, and reflection. It moves alongside the film as another form of listening, another way of staying with what cannot be fully known.

The Swimmer and Impermanent Passage are parallel works: a feature film and a creative nonfiction book, using the particular capacities of film and text to approach the same unanswered questions.

Both works move between hope and nightmare, connection and loss, fact and fiction.

Rather than resolving disappearance, The Swimmer and Impermanent Passage stay with the condition of not knowing. Ten years after the 2015–16 refugee crisis, Europe has yet to reckon with how it treated the young people who arrived seeking safety, only to find the borders closing around them. Many are still there, caught in what migrants call "the football match": moved from place to place, from one temporary status, camp, country, or appeal to the next. The work insists that these lives are not a closed chapter of history, but an unfinished political and ethical question.