Work

The ventures behind the writing.

I write about culture, diaspora, and film, and I build in the same life stories. This is what that means in practice.

A collage of scenes spanning culture, diaspora, film production, and collaboration — including Caribbean islands, Lisbon rooftops, a film clapperboard, and people at work — tinted in warm terracotta. — From the Caribbean to Lisbon. From the page to the screen.

Smadi

Most of us have spent a long time watching ourselves not exist in other people's stories. The films that shaped us were rarely about us; when they were, they were translated through someone else's eyes. Smadi is my answer to that. It's a multilingual streaming platform built for diaspora audiences. It's a place where the stories are told from the inside, in the languages people actually live in, for viewers who have been treated as an afterthought by everyone else.

I co-founded it, and I'm building it now. You can find it at smadi.tv.

I'm also writing and working on a feature film, currently in development. There's more to say about it, and I'll say it here when the time is right.

The through-line

These aren't separate from the writing — they're the same preoccupation in a different form. The essays ask what we carry across distance and who gets to tell the story; the ventures are what I'm doing about it. If any of that resonates, the newsletter is where it continues.