Sama Waham
MFA
Research Areas
Hybrid cinema; exilic narratives; accented and diasporic filmmaking; alternative narrative structures; personal and essayistic forms; experimental fiction; expanded cinema; transnational media; memory, identity, and displacement; disability justice; political aesthetics and representation.
Education
MFA, Film Production, York University
Biography
Sama Waham is a filmmaker, cinematographer and media artist whose work moves fluidly between hybrid documentary, experimental fiction and expanded cinema. Her films employ image, myth and fragmented memory to interrogate questions of exile, belonging and justice.
Rooted in the landscapes of displacement, her practice weaves together lived testimony and myth to reveal how personal and collective histories reverberate across generations. Waham's work engages with disability justice, the poetics of accented cinema and fragmentation, and the aftermath of war and protest, reimagining buried archives and oral traditions as cinematic acts of resistance and remembrance.
Her body of work critically examines how film and media art can confront erasure, reclaim marginalized narratives, and articulate diasporic subjectivities within contemporary visual culture. Through this inquiry, she pushes the boundaries of political and experimental cinema, exploring how hybrid and cine-poetic forms can render agency through form, affect, and embodied storytelling. Her films have been recognized with numerous prestigious awards and have received critical acclaim for their aesthetic innovation and political resonance.
Her most recent feature-length film, Ki~Bé ~Giš (2025), premiered at the Camden International Film Festival and continues its international festival run. The film– hybrid documentary rooted in Iraq's 2019 uprising–reawakens a forgotten fable of revolt through the eyes of exile. Her earlier award-winning works, including Sing for Me (2016), Resight (2013) and Ramp (2013), have screened widely at festivals and galleries across North America, Europe and the Middle East, often accompanied by public discussions and critical writings addressing disability, displacement, gender and the politics of representation.
At the Department of Media Study, she teaches directing, cinematography, hybrid and expanded cinema and new narrative forms. Her pedagogy integrates creative research and critical inquiry, inviting students to explore how media and screen-based arts can serve as sites of memory, healing and renewal.