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Interview with Artist and Director Mara Ahmed
On Friday November 14th, the Cinema Arts Centre is proud to be partnering with Director Mara Ahmed to present a the premiere of Mara's film
THE INJURED BODY: A FILM ABOUT RACISM IN AMERICA followed by a discussion. Recently, we sat down with Mara to learn more about her film and her process.
CAC: Mara, you began to shoot your documentary, The Injured Body, in 2018. It is now premiering at Cinema Arts Centre in 2025. When you started, racial justice protests were gaining momentum. Now, seven years later, the country feels even more divided. How has the context changed since you first picked up the camera?
Mara Ahmed: The social climate has shifted. In 2018, I wanted to document how women of color experience racism in everyday life. I was inspired by Claudia Rankine’s book, Citizen: An American Lyric, a powerful mix of prose and poetry published in 2014. It examines how racism surfaces (and resurfaces) in intimate spaces by focusing on microaggressions, small but constant acts of bigotry that target Black Americans. Rankine writes in the second person, placing the reader inside these experiences. She links private interactions to public events, writing about Serena Williams, Trayvon Martin, and police brutality. Her language is direct. She uses literary fragments and repetition to echo emotional exhaustion. The book provided a vocabulary for experiences that had mostly been ignored. The Injured Body emerged from this framework. By 2020, the Black Lives Matter protests, after George Floyd’s heinous murder, brought issues of racism and state violence to the fore. Now, in 2025, open racism has become part of national and global politics in a way that has transformed (or debunked) our notions of living in a post-World War II human rights system, however illusory it might have been. The film records some of these escalations through personal accounts in which women of color describe racist microaggressions and their cumulative effect on their physical and mental wellbeing.
CAC: You said the film was influenced by Claudia Rankine’s book. How do you see that connection now, as racial and social struggles expand across the world?
Mara Ahmed: Rankine’s work speaks about the invisibility of pain. That idea is central to the film. The stories in The Injured Body connect to movements beyond the United States. Indigenous people in Palestine, migrants in Europe, and minorities in South Asia face similar patterns of exclusion and erasure. The stories we hear in the film are specific but will sound familiar to many audiences.
CAC: Your film weaves together interviews with dance sequences, often shot outdoors across all four seasons. What inspired this visual language?
Mara Ahmed: The idea for the film’s structure really came from a multimedia project I created for the Fringe Festival back in 2017, where I worked with Japanese American choreographer Mariko Yamada. That piece explored the connection between breathing and oppression using Frantz Fanon’s writing. Fanon talks about how “we revolt because we can’t breathe,” and that idea of compromised breath has stayed with me. The colonized or racialized body struggles for something as basic and essential as air. In Citizen, Rankine describes sighing as a kind of survival mechanism, a release of tension that comes from living in a world that constantly undermines your humanity. She writes that the sigh is “a worrying exhale of an ache.” Breath is the gateway to expressivity in movement, hence the constant dialogue between interviews and dance choreography. They coalesce into a rich cinematic language.
CAC: Why did you choose to film the dance segments outdoors?
Mara Ahmed: Dance sequences are shot outdoors, in open spaces that epitomize the beauty of nature and mesh easily with music. Sky-high trees and gliding bird puppets, dancers cloaked in winter snow, fall leaves that bleed into the train of a dancer’s dress, the soothing sound of waves on a beach or bells on a Native American jingle dress – all act as buffers between difficult conversations, giving the audience time to process their thoughts and emotions.
CAC: The injured or oppressed body seems central to what you’re exploring.
Mara Ahmed: Yes, because racism acts on the body, restricting breath and movement. By foregrounding dance, we witness how bodies insist on expression anyway. Dance becomes a way to reclaim space, to heal, and to show that the body still holds power, even when it’s been harmed.
Working with local artists like Mara Ahmed is so important to the mission of the Cinema Arts Centre. We hope you will come and experience this film.
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