Imagine Me Like a Country of Love

Thana Faroq received a grant for the development of Imagine Me Like a Country of Love, a short experimental film that delves into the emotional and physical landscapes of returning to a homeland irrevocably altered by time and war. The film portrays grief as a process of confronting both what has been lost and what has taken its place. Inspired by Thana’s return to Yemen after nearly a decade, the film examines the emotional and physical transformations of a homeland shaped by the passage of time and the impact of conflict.

Thana is a Yemeni-born photographer, writer, and educator currently residing in the Netherlands. Her multidisciplinary work, which integrates photography, textual narratives, and moving images, examines transformative experiences that shape identity and belonging in Yemen and the Netherlands. Centered on themes of memory, migration, and intergenerational trauma, her work serves as a visual autobiography, highlighting women's resilience and the search for belonging in post-conflict contexts. Thana has received several prestigious honors, including the Open Society Foundation Fellowship Grant and the Arab Documentary Fund. She was recognized as "One to Watch" by the British Journal of Photography in 2020 and won the PhotoWien Photo Book Award in 2021 for her book I Don’t Recognize Me in the Shadows. Currently, she is a fellow in the inaugural ADPP fellowship program.