Ahmad the Japanese
Film (45’; coloured; languages: French, Arabic, English; subtitles: Arabic, English)
Ahmad the Japanese is a film composed of a collage of scenes from the daily life of an archetypal fictional character, generically called Ahmad, as he emigrates from the Arab world to Japan.
Filmed by Dalloul during his artist residency in Kyoto during the COVID-19 pandemic, the work intends to embody the complicated histories of immigration and cultural mixing. Being himself a French artist who grew up in Paris to Syrian parents, Dalloul purposefully places himself in an unfamiliar culture, becoming gaijin, or foreign, in the hopes of understanding the alienating journey his parents and countless other migrants have made.
The experiment in Japan allowed Dalloul to reflect deeply on the tension between the desire to belong and the reality of being an outsider. The film draws inspiration from the Mahmoud Darwish poem Ahmad Al Zaatar: “In everything, Ahmad found his opposite.” Unlike Al Zaatar, however, Dalloul managed to find commonalities within his new environment. In this foreign land, he was able to feel like a child again, to confront uncomfortable questions of identity, and to better understand aspects of his youth.
The Artist
Bady Dalloul
Lives and works in Paris
Bady Dalloul is a French-Syrian multimedia artist whose work interlaces historical events with personal truths and fiction. His pieces are imbued with sociological and historical reflections on his own heritage, particularly focusing on the global issue of migration. Through drawing, video, and physical objects, Bady engages in a dialogue between the imagined and the real, reflects on territorial demarcations, and challenges West-centred historiography and knowledge production.
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