Movement, Music And Mood

Amirah Tajdin is slowly making a name for herself within the realm of indie filmmaking. With a Sole DXB documentary to be released in April and a feature film project finally ready to seek funding, she is opening up a path for young female directors in the UAE.

- Amirah Tajdin

Amirah Tajdin is describing her feature film. Set in Kenya, it is the story of a Muslim wedding singer in Mombasa. She smiles. It is not what I had been expecting.

“He heads home to seek validation from the one person who never gave it to him – his dying mother – and finds that she’s still pretty much the same woman she’s always been,” Tajdin explains. “So he decides the only way he’s going to break through to her is through the language he knows best, which is love songs. So throughout the film he communicates with her through Swahili love songs, which is in itself a dying art form.

“I just wrapped my fifth draft. Fingers crossed we get some financing soon. We’ve been developing it for almost three years now and I’ve been writing the script for two, but only now do I feel like it’s finished.”  

The two of us are sitting in a café on the ground floor of Burj Al Salam ordering green tea and coffee. Tajdin – petite and quiet – appears shy and unsure of the wisdom of talking openly to a stranger, but is as busy as she’s ever been since returning to Dubai just over two years ago. A Sole DXB documentary, which focuses on the lifestyle platform’s fifth-year anniversary event last November. is to be released in April, while she is currently in post-production for a documentary about Syrian refugees. She describes the latter, which was commissioned by an independent philanthropist, as a poetic ode to the plight of refugees, narrated first-hand by those living in camps in Lebanon and Jordan.