Saad Salem

Salem's practice moves between directing and writing, with a particular interest in how stories are constructed under conditions of constraint — geographic, economic, psychological. His training in economics left him with a habit of reading creative fields as systems: looking at what is made visible and asking what structure produced it. His short films — developed between 2015 and 2019 — share a concern with narration that is partial, unreliable, or operating under pressure. The recurring question across the work is not what happened but how what happened gets told, and what that telling reveals about the teller. He is currently developing The Digital Trace, a new project examining what remains of a person after movement — across borders, platforms, and versions of the self.