We are delighted to announce that Until We Return, a new short film by Glasgow based Arab artist Huss, will premiere in our Unique Perspectives programme at CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow on Friday 7 November.
Commissioned by the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival in response to this year’s festival theme, Comfort & Disturb, it is composed of create of fragments shot during his final visit home to Cairo just before he was outed and forced into exile, alongside archival material sent from his family home.
Director’s Statement
Until We Return is a meditation on memory, exile, and the fragments of home we carry with us. Alongside VHS recordings of my sixth birthday, all the footage in this film has been with me for years. Footage I carried, revisited, cherished, and held onto until it felt ready to emerge. Much of it was shot during my last visit home, unaware of what was about to happen. For years, I performed with a white mask to protect my identity, and now it feels uncanny that the same figure that once marked my exile guides us on a journey through the Nile in the film.
This work was heavily inspired by Fairuz’s song Nassam Alayna El Hawa, in which she begs the wind to take her home, particularly the translated lines:
I am afraid, my heart of growing up in this exile, and my hometown will not know who I am. Take me, take me, take me back home.
These words echo throughout the film, shaping its rhythm and emotional core. Using degraded VHS, personal recordings, and dreamlike landscapes, the film flows like the river itself, moving between presence and absence, memory and possibility.
At its heart, the work imagines a return and a reclamation of home and belonging, both personal and collective. It envisions a queer Arab utopia, where exile never existed, where memory and desire can rewrite what was lost. By holding onto these fragments, the film reflects on how home can be carried, even across distance and time.
Until We Return is, ultimately, a love letter to my past and future self, and to anyone navigating displacement in whatever form. It is a reminder that memory, longing, and resilience can carve out new possibilities for belonging, even in exile.
Join us for the premiere of Until We Return in our Unique Perspectives programme at 3.20pm on Friday 7 November at CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow.
