Musawir
Abrar

My creative practice examines how people hold on to dignity and selfhood under pressure, whether that pressure comes from the systems around them or from within. I make character-centered narrative films about people who are often overlooked, unheard, or misread: a man worn down by bureaucracy, grief, and financial strain; a painter measuring herself against an impossible standard; a photographer losing their sight.

I understand filmmaking as a formal and ethical practice of attention. Through performance, framing, duration, sound, and narrative structure, I try to create spaces where audiences confront the distance between themselves and a character, and then recognize how short that distance actually is. I write, direct, produce, and edit my own films, and editing my own work has shaped how I shoot and write, because I am already thinking in terms of rhythm and duration when I am on set or at the page.

I treat narrative filmmaking as a practice-based research method, working from documented conditions: Pay the Difference came out of labor law, reporting on families who cannot afford to claim their dead, and conversations with a handyman and a funeral home worker. A statistic about misclassification produces agreement or disagreement, but time spent inside a life unlike your own produces something closer to empathy. Waiting Rooms puts the same subject in a form that is inhabited rather than watched.

My written research pursues a related question about form. At the 2025 University Film & Video Association conference I presented “Abbas Kiarostami’s Methods of Bridging Documentary and Fiction: A Study of Close-up,” which traces how documentary technique placed inside a fiction film produces a sense of reality stronger than the one the film began with. I am completing an MFA in Digital Media & Design at the University of Connecticut, where I have been Instructor of Record since 2025, and I hold a 2025 UFVA Graduate Fellowship.