Sophia Al-Maria Movies

An adaptation of Moby Dick as a silent film and theatre piece with a postcolonial and queer reading that highlights its marginal characters.

My Blackest self, whose whitest death, is luxury. I am no stranger anymore. The world is love to me.

Al-Maria’s Mirror Cookie installation presents an intentionally disjointed monologue that references a self-help technique known as “mirror work.” It gradually develops into an impassioned improvisation delivered directly to the camera, as if the fourth wall she’s breaking is a reflection....

A tribute to the disappearing Arabian humpback whale population, tracing its near extinction as a consequence of the high-speed development of the Persian Gulf.

'Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time.' - J.G. Ballard

An exquisite corpse, the film extends the artist’s interests in the writings of Etel Adnan, the coming present and the personal as political.

A surreal interview with Chinese-American actress Bai Ling, cast as a 'love goddess' and speaking on the subject of vengefulness.

‘Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time.’ – J.G. Ballard

A companion piece to The Magical State, Ziruma reveals the bloody Wayuu cosmogony.

A Wayuu woman is possessed by a 40 million-year-old oil demon.

Remixing the collections of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Tiger Strike Red is an oneiric jaunt through an alternative art history that finds playful linkages between classical marble sculpture, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, representations of Judith’s beheading of Holofernes, AI art, and an...

Black Friday presents a hypnotic rendering of two large shopping malls in Doha that become a sacred sanctuary where the two protagonists, the artist and her sister, both wearing abayas, walk up and down endless escalators, in a sort of relentless procession inside immense empty and opulent...

A belly dance-off mixing femme and masc in a sensual homage to the form.

Though only the recipient can fully decode this video love letter, it is general enough to be read as a universal love poem.

A baby bird moves in the sand, watched by a mysterious stranger,

Etel Adnan's poem 'The Arab Apocalypse' from 1989 describes a future world in a state of emergency. The poem is the suggestive science fiction backdrop of Sophia Al-Maria's performative video work 'Beast Type Song', which is set in the abandoned space that previously housed Saint Martin's School of...

Rushes of the 2012 Eid al-Adha slaughter shot for the climax of the abandoned feature film Beretta.