Kenyan artist and filmmaker Amirah Tajdin describes her film as “a meditative visual on the African immigrant experience in Dubai. A story of Black love in a shifting universe.” Negotiating Liberation: Don't Be a Dream, Please Be Real touches on the idea of the spirit of the United Arab Emirates as a place where new metropolises are being built, where dreams are born, and to which the title of “the new world” currently belongs.

“As Africans, we have turned our gaze to this Eastern nugget of the modern world and no longer that of typical Western ideals of where we can go to achieve our dreams,” says Tajdin. “Dreams that our often complicated governments fail to let us fulfill back home.

Negotiating Liberation: Don't Be a Dream, Please Be Real is a love story of a young African couple told across three chapters. They dance, eat and play in a residential estate that is still under construction—a metaphor for the promising future they have planned together that is still in the works. Tajdin deftly carries the film with a strong visual language that blends reality with fiction against the far-flung beauty of Dubai.

This film was commissioned by the Goethe-Institut in the Gulf Region. It forms part of a series of films that feature eight other artist responses to the themes of life, culture, and migrancy in the United Arab Emirates.