I--- Fylm My First Summer 2020 Mtrjm Fasl Alany | ESSENTIAL ✮ |

To film this summer is to admit that the medium itself is inadequate. Film craves movement — the dolly shot, the pan across a crowded beach, the close-up of sweat on a lover’s brow. But my first summer of 2020 offered only static frames: a laptop on a kitchen table, a hand washing groceries in the sink, a window through which the world looked like a postcard from an extinct civilization. And yet, I filmed. I filmed the way light changed across my bedroom wall from 7 AM to 7 PM. I filmed my mother’s hands kneading bread — an act so ancient it felt like rebellion against the newness of the virus. I filmed the feral cat that adopted our porch, because at least something moved without permission.

What did I learn from filming? That a first summer can be a summer of first endings . First time watching a funeral on an iPad. First time realizing that “I’ll see you next year” was not a promise but a prayer. The camera does not lie, but it also does not flinch. When I review the footage now — grainy, shaky, too much sky because I was crying behind the viewfinder — I see a young person learning that time is not a river but a series of locked doors. Some seasons do not lead to the next season. They just stop. i--- fylm My First Summer 2020 mtrjm fasl alany

The command is simple: I film . Not “I remember” or “I write,” but I film . The camera becomes an extension of the eye, a prosthetic memory for a season that refused to behave like any summer before it. My First Summer 2020 — though for many it was not a first summer at all, but a suspension of all summers past — arrives as a translated text. The Arabic phrase mtrjm fasl alany (مترجم فصل الآن) haunts the frame: a season translated, and a translation that exists only in the urgent, trembling present. To film this summer is to admit that