Dust Away

Dust Away is a short documentary about the other-worldly experiences of workers who toiled on some of the major city-wide cleaning projects in New York City. Through the shared memories of former asbestos and Ground Zero cleaners who are part of a support group in Queens, Dust Away roams between a dreamscape of miniatures and 16mm footage, exploring the dissonant nature of cleaning labor between necessity and invisibility. The participants in this film are members of the Nuestros Heroes Project support group, which was founded in 2010.

This project is inspired by sanitation workers and sanitation-related projects in NYC. In the process, I engaged, reported, and collaborated with the NYC Sanitation Department, anthropologist Robin Nagle, urban thinker/scholar and editor Mariana Mogilevich and many more.

I collaborated with talented and amazing people in this project. This list does not do justice:

Co-directors: Dea Gjinovci and Tanita Rahmani

Co-producers: Tanita Rahmani and Rosa Maria Bramble

Set designer: Carley Townsend

Co-editors: Maria Fernanda Simonsen and Dea Gjinovci

Interpreter: Sara Redeghieri, Ginou Choueiri

Original Music: wanhanzan music

As I deepen my love for the world of non-fiction storytelling, I began venturing into the film medium. I was selected as part of the artist-in-residence/fellow at UnionDocs Collaborative Lab in 2021-2022 and co-directed/wrote/sound designed a short documentary, Dust Away. The program allowed me to participate in a rigorous training and collaboration in media and documentary art, urban research, journalism and filmmaking, among others.

Dust Away was an official selection at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2022, International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) 2022, DOCNYC 2022, DOC10 2023, and Cinéma Sous Les Étoiles Film Festival Montreal 2023. It was also shortlisted in the Competition of Short Documentary at IDFA and named Best International Short Documentary at Cinéma Sous Les Étoiles.