Wanderer
(Basmalah Mahmoud, 2026)

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

Wanderer aimed to make the architecture of identity felt rather than simply observed — tracing not just the stripping away of selfhood alone, but its persistence in the spaces, objects, languages and silences that institutions cannot reach.

The film began from the conviction that the longing for home is not exclusive to displacement but is, in different pressures and registers, a universal condition. I chose to explore this through the theme of displacement because it makes visible what many carry quietly: that home is not always a place but can be multiple things: a person, a bag, a language, and its absence one of the most disorienting and alienating things a person can hold.

At its heart, Wanderer is about the self that refuses to disappear, and the fragments — an object, a language, another person — in which it survives.

This film is produced as part of my practice-based dissertation project.

SYNOPSIS

Wanderer follows Layla Hassan, a young Syrian refugee navigating the UK asylum system in the aftermath of the 2011 Syrian War. Arriving with nothing but a small bag — the last surviving fragment of home — Layla moves through a series of spaces that systematically construct her otherness: a dehumanising asylum interview, a sparse government accommodation block, and a street encounter that exposes the gendered violence of displacement. It is only through her relationship with Sonya, an Iranian-Iraqi refugee living in the same accommodation, that Layla finds a space of genuine recognition — one conducted almost entirely in Arabic, outside the English-speaking structures designed to process them. Structured around a bilingual subtitle framework, Wanderer traces the quiet architecture of alienation: the silence chosen over surrender, the objects that carry identity, and the self that refuses, despite everything, to disappear.

CAST

Maryam Hassanein

Summar Lindsay Shihadah

Someyeh Roustaei

Aison Clarke

Phoebe Elizabeth Teasdale

Ben Burtt

Summar Lindsay Shihadah
Maryam Hassanein
Someyeh Roustaei
Aison Clarke
Phoebe Elizabeth Teasdale
Ben Burtt

Basmalah Mahmoud (Writer, Director)
James Samuel (DOP, Editor)
Samuel Sultanna (Producer, Assistant Director)
Pollyanna Harrison (Assistant Producer)
Yolly Tung (Production Designer)
Cheney Kamara (Production design assistant)
Rebecca McSkeane (Production design assistant)
Maya Rivera (Production design assistant)
Jasper Rushen (Script/Continuity Supervisor)
Ivan Yip Yuhan (1st Assistant camera & Lighting Assistant)
Samuel Poon (Colourist)
Owen Mccann (Lighting Assistant)
Ambra Fernandez (Assistant Camera)
Ann Chiang (Assistant Camera & Lighting Assistant)
Orla Molloy (Unit stills photographer)
Roshan Adve (Sound designer)
Audia Nathania (Music composer)
Lauren Smith (Sound recordist)
Lily Graf (Sound recordist)
Evie Jackson (Sound recordist)
Vaughn Hollingsworth (Safety Officer)
Jorja (Runner)
Millie Stephens (Runner)

BTS

Evie Jackson (Sound recordist)

CREW

Basmalah Mahmoud (Writer, Director)
James Samuel (DOP, Editor)
Samuel Sultanna (Producer, Assistant Director)
Pollyanna Harrison (Assistant Producer)
Yolly Tung (Production Designer)
Roshan Adve (Sound designer)
Audia Nathania (Music composer)
Samuel Poon (Colourist)
Cheney Kamara (Production design assistant)
Rebecca McSkeane (Production design assistant)
Maya Rivera (Production design assistant)
Jasper Rushen (Script/Continuity Supervisor)
Ivan Yip Yuhan (1st Assistant camera & Lighting Assistant)
Owen Mccann (Lighting Assistant)
Ambra Fernandez (Assistant Camera)
Orla Molloy (Unit stills photographer)
Lily Graf (Sound recordist)
Evie Jackson (Sound recordist)
Vaughn Hollingsworth (Safety Officer)
Jorja (Runner)
Lauren Smith (Sound recordist)
Millie Stephens (Runne

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