Projects
What remains when a story is removed, delayed, or denied form?
Stories from Nowhere is a Community Interest Company working across film, storytelling, public events, and experimental forms.
We work with stories that fall between categories:
not fully archived, not fully visible, not easily processed.
Some disappear through violence.
Some through bureaucracy.
Some because there is no recognised place for them.
We don’t extract stories.
We don’t simplify them.
We create conditions where they can exist as they are.
Our work moves between cinema, live storytelling, sculpture, festivals, and public space. Each project asks a different version of this question.
What does cinema look like when it comes from exile?
The SAMA International Film Festival is an established platform for filmmakers working under conditions of conflict, censorship, and displacement.
The Brighton edition brings this work into dialogue with local audiences through screenings, conversations, and public events.
SAMA is not about representation.
It is about survival of expression.
The festival creates space for films that could not safely be made, shown, or discussed elsewhere.
Project Structure Overview
The Disappearings is structured in three distinct but connected layers. Each layer addresses a different question: why the project exists, what disappearance is, and how the film tells this story. Together, they form a coherent whole without overlap or confusion.
1. Author’s Position / Origin
The Disappearings began as something personal. I am Afghan, and like many in the diaspora, I have been watching the quiet violence unfold since the Taliban’s return to power. People I recognise, people whose lives resemble those of my family and friends, have been taken or killed without explanation. What struck me most was not only the brutality, but the silence around it. No trials. No records. No closure. Just absence.
Politically, the project responds to disappearance as a tool of authoritarian power. These killings are not spectacles of punishment but acts of erasure, designed to silence communities by removing people without trace or ceremony. The violence is procedural, carried out without due process, and aimed at corroding civic life, forcing withdrawal, migration, and long-term instability. This is not random cruelty, but a system.
The Disappearings sits between these two positions. It is not journalism or documentation, but an artistic response that focuses on individual lives. Through short, intimate stories inspired by those who have been disappeared, the project resists erasure by restoring presence. It asks what remains when witnesses are removed, and answers with attention, memory, and care.
2. Core Definition / Backbone
The Disappearings is a chapter-based animated film about people removed through targeted, extrajudicial violence carried out by clandestine groups operating under the command of the Taliban to produce terror. This violence is organised, deliberate, and largely unrecorded. Terror is generated not only through murder itself, but through silence and partial knowledge: some people know what is happening, others sense it, and many turn away because the brutality makes witnessing dangerous.
The film does not depict violence directly. Instead, it focuses on its consequences: absence, interruption, and the slow transformation of everyday life. Disappearance is felt rather than shown, through what is missing, what is delayed, and what can no longer be spoken.
The project does not argue or explain. It approaches disappearance as a lived human experience, felt in the body, in time, and in the ordinary acts of waiting, hoping, fearing, and remembering. By staying close to personal stories, the film reaches toward something universal: how terror corrodes trust, reshapes social life, and alters the fragile ways people hold on to one another.
3. Form and Structure
The film is structured like a book, composed of chapters. Each chapter centres on the life of one individual who has disappeared, and the people, spaces, and routines shaped by that loss. The chapters are connected by tone and theme, but each functions as a complete, self-contained story.
Animation is used not to stylise violence, but to approach absence, memory, and interior experience with care. Domestic spaces, landscapes, gestures, and rhythms of daily life carry the narrative. The moment of disappearance itself is never shown; it is registered through interruption, silence, and aftermath.
This structure allows the project to exist in multiple forms. As a whole, The Disappearings functions as a short animated feature. At the same time, each chapter can stand alone and be shared independently without losing its integrity. This modular approach reflects the nature of disappearance itself: individual lives taken one by one, yet forming a larger pattern when seen together.
If you lose your place, what do you become instead?
Simorgh is a mythic, autobiographical project that moves between poetry, film, sculpture, and participatory practice.
Drawing from Persian mythology and lived experience, the work explores flight not as escape, but as transformation. The Simorgh is not a destination. It is a mirror.
The project unfolds through:
- poetic text
- kite-based sculpture
- animation and film
- public participation
Simorgh is concerned with identity after rupture, with what is carried forward when the past cannot return intact.
For cities, movement, and the geographies of belonging.
Urban Cosmos views cities as dynamic ecosystems shaped by culture, migration, infrastructure, and aspiration.
It explores how urban spaces carry memory, how diasporic communities create belonging across distance, and how Afrofuturist ideas can inspire new forms of architecture, mobility, and communal life.
This pillar treats the city as both a physical place and an imaginative realm — where new futures are continuously rehearsed.
Why This Matters Now
Afghanistan is facing one of the most severe humanitarian crises in the world. At the same time, pathways to safety have narrowed. The Afghan Resettlement Scheme has closed, and many Afghans evacuated in August 2021 now face eviction and uncertainty in the UK.
Fly With Me does not claim to solve this. It does something quieter and more human.
It refuses erasure.
Fly a Kite With Us
In 2022, over 7,500 people flew kites in solidarity across the world.
You can still take part.
Learn how to make an authentic Afghan kite with master kite maker Sanjar Qiam, and fly it in a park, on a hill, or in the centre of your town. All you need are a few wooden skewers, tissue paper, string, and a willingness to look up.
You can download instructions and watch the video guide here.
Since the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan, cultural life has been systematically erased. Music, theatre, dance, and visual representations of living beings have been banned. Drawing or depicting sentient objects is prohibited. Women and girls have been silenced, barred from speaking publicly, and denied access to education, work, and independence. Public floggings have returned, and executions have taken place.
This is not simply repression. It is the deliberate dismantling of a culture.
That is why we fly kites.
Why Fly With Me?
Fly With Me is an international kite flying initiative in solidarity with the people of Afghanistan.
On 15 August 2022, marking one year since the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, Fly With Me launched as an immersive, international event presented by Afghan artists, actors, and sportspeople, and organised by Good Chance. The event took place across 47 locations in the UK, Europe, and North America.
Kite flying, an ancient Afghan craft, became an aerial act of solidarity. At a time when music, theatre, dance, and visual art were being banned inside Afghanistan, the sky itself became a shared cultural space.
I now continue Fly With Me annually in Brighton, where I live and work.
Stories From Nowhere 