I'm Migrant Festival in London highlights SWANA filmmakers, cultural survival, and the long afterlife of migration

Over several nights in London, audiences are gathering for the I'm Migrant Film Festival, a programme of films exploring migration, exile, and cultural inheritance across the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) region and its diasporas. 

Bringing together filmmakers, artists, and community members, the festival — running until 27 February — offers an alternative to dominant cinematic narratives of displacement. It offers narratives that too often reduce migration to moments of crisis or arrival rather than the lives that unfold beyond them.

Shaped by the curatorial vision of Iraqi filmmaker and writer Yamam Nabeel, I'm Migrant operates at the intersection of cinema, archive, and community practice. 

Rather than positioning itself as a showcase of "migrant stories" for external consumption, the festival centres films made from within long histories of movement, labour, and exile — and screens them for audiences who recognise these histories as their own.

A parallel culture in exile

At its core, the I'm Migrant Film Festival is shaped by a simple but often overlooked premise: migration is not a single moment of departure or rupture, but an ongoing condition that continues to shape memory, language, labour, and cultural life long after borders are crossed.

The project did not begin as a film festival. It emerged from Yamam's documentary research into Iraqi artists who have lived in Europe since the 1960s and 1970s — a generation shaped by exile, yet central to the preservation and transformation of Iraqi cultural heritage beyond the nation-state.

"In creating that project, I wanted to preserve the heritage of the wider region," Yamam tells The New Arab, "as well as the parallel Iraq created in exile by some of the generation's greatest artists."

His idea of a "parallel Iraq" challenges narratives that frame migration primarily as cultural loss, instead foregrounding how culture adapts, recomposes, and becomes more deliberate in exile.

Across the films that make up I'm Migrant, exile is not presented as a clean break between past and present, nor reduced to trauma alone. Rather, it appears as a space of continuity shaped by memory, responsibility, and creative survival.

Artists — painters, poets, filmmakers, calligraphers, and dancers — are foregrounded not as remnants of a lost world, but as active carriers of culture across generations.

The programme spans stories from Sudan to Lebanon, Iraq to Morocco, and Palestine to its diasporas. 

These films are not assembled to flatten difference, but to insist on specificity: each context carries its own histories of colonialism, war, labour migration, and displacement. 

What unites them is a refusal to be reduced to singular narratives of crisis. 

As Yamam puts it, "It is important to platform the contribution of the region, not only to our own heritage, but to the culture and heritage of Europe" – a reminder that European cultural life has long been shaped by migrant and exiled communities, even as those contributions remain obscured.

Chosen families and collective laughter

Many of the films operate as fragments of a living archive, foregrounding intimacy — family dynamics, private desires, everyday routines – alongside structural violence shaped by war, racialised labour systems, colonial borders, and migration policy. 

Queer lives are situated within longer histories disrupted by colonial impositions of rigid gender and sexual binaries, while working-class migration is traced through family photographs and personal archives rather than data or statistics. 

Together, these films show how the migrant worker in Europe became racialised as "foreign," even across generations.

This focus on intimacy and collectivity was particularly visible in Queer Stories of the SWANA Region, one of the festival's themed screenings, which included Sara Harrak's short film Solers United. 

Set within a grassroots women's football team in East London facing eviction, the film explores desire and belonging against the pressures of gentrification and the loss of communal space.

Though the story centres on a relationship between two teammates, its stakes extend beyond romance to the fragile structures that allow communities to survive.

For Sara, a second-generation Moroccan filmmaker, the film is rooted in lived experience. "This film was inspired by my own East London football team," she tells The New Arab. 

"I wanted to shine a light on the old community feel that's been lost to gentrification." 

Rather than framing displacement solely in terms of loss, Solers United embraces comedy — a choice Sara describes as politically necessary. 

"I want people to feel lighter when leaving the cinema," she says. "I want them to want to be part of this chosen family."

Screening the film within I'm Migrant carried particular weight. Sara notes that it was received differently than at other festivals, especially by audiences who recognised themselves on screen. 

"Being a second-generation immigrant, it was an honour to screen to people like me," she says, adding that the response reaffirmed the importance of comedy in SWANA storytelling. 

"Comedy is a powerful tool to break barriers and humanise Muslim characters — sometimes more so than drama."

Elsewhere in the programme, filmmakers engage with the long afterlives of catastrophe — the Nakba, civil war, genocide, and state violence — without turning suffering into spectacle. 

These works resist explanation or closure, asking audiences to sit with unresolved questions rather than offering resolution.

Beyond palatability

The urgency of I'm Migrant is inseparable from its political moment. As anti-immigrant rhetoric continues to shape public discourse across Europe, cultural work on migration is increasingly expected to explain itself — to translate complex histories into narratives that are legible, reassuring, and easily consumed. 

Yamam explicitly rejects this framing. "It has become increasingly urgent to establish the origins of our heritage and culture," he says, "and to platform voices that represent our long lineage from the SWANA region."

Rather than arguing for the humanity of migrants or correcting dominant narratives on their own terms, I'm Migrant works alongside them. 

Its programme prioritises films made with migrant and diasporic audiences in mind, without excluding those encountering these histories for the first time. 

This approach is reflected in the structure of the festival itself: there is no single flagship film or auteur, and no overarching narrative arc. Meaning is built cumulatively, across geographies, generations, and lived experience.

The festival also resists the familiar division between audiences seeking recognition and those seeking understanding. 

For viewers with lived experience of migration, the films offer more than representation. They treat culture as something actively sustained – often in the margins of host societies — where SWANA heritage persists as everyday practice rather than distant memory.

For other audiences, the films do not invite empathy from a safe distance. They insist on proximity, showing how migration has long shaped European cultural life through labour, language, and daily presence.

Migration is not framed as an external crisis, but as an ongoing condition embedded in the present.

Taken together, I'm Migrant reframes home not as a fixed point of origin or arrival, but as something continually made.

Yamam's curatorial vision moves between the historical and the everyday, foregrounding entanglement over difference and challenging the hardened boundaries of political discourse.

Rather than trading in the nostalgia of return, the festival focuses on what endures: languages reshaped over time, new forms of belonging, and histories carried in bodies that exceed borders.

In doing so, I'm Migrant positions migrants not as guests, but as cultural producers — actively building home in motion.

[Cover image: Neo Nahda (2023) dir. May Ziadé. Courtesy of Other People's Films]

The 'I'm Migrant Film Festival' is running from 1-27 February in London. Check out the full program on imff.co.uk

Tamara Alfarisi is a freelance writer and journalist covering culture, migration, and human rights in the Middle East and North Africa

Follow her on Instagram: @tamaralfarisi