KhadraLet the Dead Go Home
Project Vision
Khadra is an experimental memoir tracing a Palestinian-Jordanian's spiritual journey across Arab diasporas to Palestine, weaving ancestral memory with magical realism to reimagine liberated futures. In essence, this film is a cinematic narrative about Indigenous Futurism that explores the process of letting the dead go home to learn what it means to love again.
Named in honor of my great grandmother Khadra, a Bedouin who was the first in her lineage to mysteriously appear with green eyes, this biographical film hybridizes documentary storytelling with fictional recreation to explore diasporic identity amid genocide and displacement.
Themes & Concepts
Magical Realism Elements
Fictional scenes where ancestors and descendants meet at temporal crossroads
Encounters between my future self and great grandmother Khadra in desert landscapes
Visualizations through "Alam al-Malakut" - the realm where time and territory dissolve
Desert pilgrimages on camelback bridging past and future
The concept of "khodr" (green) traced across landscapes from New York fields to Jordanian grazing lands
Production Journey
Phase I: Turtle Island
Documenting student and community protests, encampments, and Arab diasporas in the US. Collecting stories from Palestinian, Egyptian, Sudanese, and other families across the cinematic greenery of Turtle Island.
Phase II: Childhood Returns
Journeying to Saudi Arabia, specifically Al Khobar where I spent my childhood, to reconnect with formative landscapes and memories.
Phase III: Ancestral Homelands
Traveling through Palestine, Jordan, and beyond to trace family stories separated after the Nakba, exploring Jordan's grazing lands where Palestinians settled after 1948 and 1967.
Reclaiming Identity
A central narrative thread explores my family name "Mir'ie," legally changed to Murry by my father before our US immigration to disconnect from his carceral history, and my process of reclaiming connections to family members separated after the Nakba.
Director's Vision
"There are dimensions of freedom we could have never imagined if we did not start fighting for what we thought was freedom.""— Angela Davis
My filmmaking foundation includes two 10-minute documentaries and the very first footage I ever captured documented my family's migration from Saudi Arabia to the US—raw, intimate material that forms this project's documentary backbone alongside family archives spanning multiple generations and countries.
Cinematic Lineage
Khadra builds directly from my recent short documentary "Love as Revolution," where the final moments speak of "letting the dead go home to learn what it means to love again" — a concept that becomes the central exploration of this experimental memoir.