Clench My Fists is a found-footage collage video that explores the process of growing up in an Arab family deeply affected by death and grief. Using footage from the Lebanese film “In the Battlefields,” as well as “Candy” and “The 100,” and audio from archival recorded Lebanese funeral laments, the video looks at how men and women express grief and anger under the patriarchy, as well as how trauma and childhood experiences can evolve into mental illness and patterns of behavior as adults. Clench My Fists is part of a larger body of work dealing with racial identity and the concept of “inherited grief;” that through biological or behavioral means, trauma is passed down through prospective family generations so that family members might experience the residual effects of trauma they did not personally witness. This body of work explores how the death of the artist’s grandfather, an Arab American, caused ripples of mental illness and skewed racial identity through her paternal family. Using filmic material that the artist used to connect with her heritage, Clench My Fists is part of a series of work focusing on not only decolonizing Imperialist Western understandings of the Middle East but to also show the beauty of the artist’s heritage, outside the context of her family.

About the Filmmaker:

Sarah Trad is a video artist who explores the relationship between subjective and objective emotionality, navigating daily life and relationships while faced with mental illness, and breaking down stereotypes of gender and narrative. Her work also highlights how mental illness and coming from marginalized backgrounds intersects with internal emotional worlds. The living embodiment of the correlation between chronic depression and binge-watching practices, her work appropriates and manipulates found footage from movies, music videos and television. Trad’s work uses recognizable narrative structures to be viewed in and outside the academy of art, as well as comment on the individual’s relationship to pop culture.