about me

I am an Italian freelance Journalist and Filmmaker.

I am a published writer on Italian, British newspapers such as Il Sole 24 Ore and The Frontline Club London, while reporting from Cairo during the uprisings known as the Egyptian Revolution. I also worked as a Reporter for the Cairo-based news website Bikya Masr and directed ‘Bulaq’, short documentary film on forced evictions in a Cairo popular neighbourhood, and their link with demonstrations in Tahrir Square. My last film ‘Merqana’, is an observational documentary on the commodity chain of qat in and around the city of Harar, in eastern Ethiopia. ‘Merqana’ is currently in post-production.

Graduated from SOAS with a MA in Near and Middle Eastern Studies (Distinction) in 2010, in my dissertation entitled ‘Debating Mulids Having Fun’ I discussed these popular, religious festivals as intricate sites where opposing discourses about piety are played out in ambiguous and contradictory ways. Through the pursuit of fun, mulid‐goers formulate complex recontextualisations of sufi aesthetic experiences that comment on the highly debated nature of the ritual and on their own precarious existence. In fact mulids offer spaces for the instantiation of ambiguous moral dispositions that defy modernist approaches to piety and resist the pressure of an increasingly Islamising public sphere. The nondiscursive nature of mulid fun embodies radically dichotomizing debated notions of religion bearing witness to how the oppositional nature of discursively constructed representations is overcome into ritual performances and complex kinaesthetic experiences.