Of bodies and politics: towards a body of work in the documentaries of Raja Amari

Abstract

ABSTRACT Raja Amari is best known for her fiction features Red Satin (2002), Buried Secrets (2009) and Foreign Body (2016), in which she dissects the mythologisation of mother and daughter relationships by underlining difficult communication and co-dependence. Her less well-known documentaries Seekers of Oblivion (2004) and She Had a Dream (2020) likewise explore the bonds between women of different generations and across geographical, religious and political borders. In this article, I investigate Amari’s transnational documentary strategies that foreground the multitude of women’s voices, storytelling strategies, performative identity formation, and female agency. These two documentaries focus on the body of work of extra-ordinary women, who force us into an analytical engagement with diverse voices and politics. The documentaries offer insight into the gendered, racial and generational boundaries that are constantly crossed by two young women who lived more than a century apart. This leads to the article’s central argument that transnational documentary studies offer an opportunity to realign transnational screen studies with its subject, the transnational human experience.