Open Country
Details
Artist: Amaal Said
Title: Open Country
Year: 2025
Duration: 13 minutes 10 Seconds
Medium: Single-channel video with stereo sound. Digital with segements of 16mm film transferred to digital
Credit: Amaal Said, Open Country, 2025. Courtesy the artist. Commissioned for The Open Road by Film and Video Umbrella, Forma and Three Rivers. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England. Selected for AFI'26 by Forma, London.
Open Country (2025)
Amaal Said Selected by Forma, London.
Amaal Said’s Open Country (2025) explores visibility, belonging, and the politics of movement within the contemporary British landscape. Following a Somali mother and daughter travelling from London into the Kent countryside, the film reflects on how histories of migration, race, and national identity continue to shape who is permitted to occupy and move through particular spaces, and under what conditions they are seen. The landscape emerges not as neutral terrain, but as a site shaped by inherited cultural imaginaries, where inclusion and exclusion remain deeply embedded.
As the daughter records an audio cassette diary for her grandmother in Somalia, the film unfolds through gestures of conversation, observation, and reflection. The cassette becomes both testimony and connective thread: a means of speaking across distance, generations, and geographies. Through this layered act of address, Open Country foregrounds the emotional and political dimensions of diasporic life, navigating tensions between familiarity and estrangement, presence and longing.
Adopting a restrained and attentive visual language grounded in care and lived experience, Said resists spectacle or fixed narratives of identity. Instead, the film lingers within moments of stillness and attention, proposing visibility as something fragile, relational, and self-determined — shaped as much by the right to appear as by the freedom to move, belong, and remain partially unseen.
Forma, London Say:
'Forma selected Open Country for Artists’ Film International because of the sensitivity with which Amaal Said approaches questions of representation, belonging, and visibility within the British landscape. Developed during a residency at FormaHQ, the film reflects on what it means to move through space as a Black Muslim woman — navigating the tensions between presence, exposure, and the desire for connection within environments historically shaped by exclusion and inherited ideas of national identity.
Recently co-commissioned by Forma with Film and Video Umbrella and Three Rivers as part of The Open Road, Open Country foregrounds forms of attention and self-representation that resist spectacle or fixed narratives of identity. Rather than positioning the landscape as neutral terrain, Said reveals it as something socially and historically constructed: a space where questions of belonging are continually negotiated through acts of looking, movement, and appearance.
The film’s power lies in its restraint. Through a quiet and deeply attentive cinematic language grounded in care and lived experience, Open Country proposes visibility as something fragile and self-determined — shaped not only by the ability to be seen, but by the freedom to occupy space on one’s own terms.'
Antonia Shaw, Head of Programmes, Forma
Amaal Said offered:
'Open Country has been an enriching experience for me, both personally and professionally. Through the project, I was able to reflect on my relationship to physical space as a Black Muslim woman, and on how visibility and safety are negotiated in everyday life. I wanted the work to create space for a mother and daughter to move freely through the landscape. Their journey becomes an act of discovery, of place, but also of one another. Making this work required confronting my own anxieties around public space: the ways I have learned to hide and to minimise myself. Allowing the camera to follow this journey, and inviting an audience to witness it, felt both challenging and liberating.'
Amaal Said
Artist Q&A
What does a democratic, international film programme such as Artists' Film International, mean to you as an artist?
I’m really excited by the prospect of exhibiting alongside artists from a wide range of backgrounds, each bringing their own histories and ways of seeing. A programme like Artists’ Film International creates space for works to sit beside one another in conversation, rather than competition.
At a time when borders feel increasingly rigid, it’s powerful to be part of a programme that moves across them. I think it allows for unexpected connections to emerge between works, and for audiences to encounter perspectives they might not otherwise come across.
For me, it’s not just about visibility, but about being in dialogue, especially across distance and language.
What compels you to work with moving image, and when did you first become interested in the medium?
I’ve been drawn to moving images for a long time. As a teenager, I would make small, informal videos of friends and family as a way of holding onto moments.
That instinct has stayed with me, but my relationship to the medium has deepened. Moving image allows me to work with time and memory in a way that photography can’t always hold. There’s something powerful about letting a moment unfold.
More recently, it has also offered me a way to step back from the immediacy of the photographic image, and to think more carefully about what it means to look and frame.
This year’s theme, A Kind of Power, brings together films which explore the ethics of looking, watching and witnessing. In a world where images circulate instantly and visibility can both empower and endanger, how do you navigate the responsibility of looking - and of asking others to look - in your work?
This film emerged during a period where I had stepped away from photographing professionally. I was questioning my own intentions in how I represent people, what it means to make images of others, and how far those images travel once they leave my hands.
As a Black Muslim woman, I am aware of what it means to be hypervisible. To be looked at, read, and sometimes misread in public space. That awareness shapes how I approach image-making. I’m interested in creating work that holds space for people rather than fixing them into something easily consumed.
I think a lot about consent and trust. About what it means to look with care, rather than simply to look. And about what I am asking of the viewer, not just to see, but to sit with and to recognise their own position within that act of looking.
What new projects or lines of research are currently preoccupying you?
I’ve been thinking a lot about movement. What keeps us rooted in place, and what allows or prevents us from moving. I’m interested in the fragility of belonging: how much is required to become a citizen, and how little it can take to have that status questioned or removed.
Increasingly, I find myself drawn to documents, passports, papers, records, and the ways in which they are used to prove and re-prove one’s existence and one’s right to remain.
There’s something in that tension between movement and restriction that feels central to my current thinking.
Details
Artist: Amaal Said
Title: Open Country
Year: 2025
Duration: 13 minutes 10 Seconds
Medium: Single-channel video with stereo sound. Digital with segements of 16mm film transferred to digital
Credit: Amaal Said, Open Country, 2025. Courtesy the artist. Commissioned for The Open Road by Film and Video Umbrella, Forma and Three Rivers. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England. Selected for AFI'26 by Forma, London.