As a diaspora, Akelo shares common issues of searching for identity, positioning, and the idea of a home in her poems that touch on subjects such as naivety, culture, trauma, adolescence, family, and love. Growing up as a South Sudanese in Australia, she has always been interested in the visual media and fascinated with storytelling. Akelo speaks to us about her first short film “Daughter of the Nile” which will be her debut in both writing and film.

The poems were to be originally presented in an interactive exhibition for Akelo wished to provide a complete experience to the audience, as poems and written words alone would not do her idea any justice. But with the hit of the pandemic, the artist started exploring different ways to present her work and challenge her abilities and the film was a result of experimenting with new mediums for Akelo’s expression and creativity.

With Akelo as the main subject in the visuals, the film opens with the first poem “Monday Braids At School” written across the screen with no voice-over to amplify the words as Akelo mentioned to us. The warm tones of these scenes, the character’s apparel, and the textbook reflect a nostalgia for what appears to be Akelo’s remembrance of her mornings of school days. As a black child with textured hair, she describes her relationship with her hair and how it is an extension of her being, her core, and her blackness.

“Silky girl, you may turn to rock
“I beg leave my extensions of being. For me and my black self”

As a child, Akelo’s constant move from one country to another had everything to do with what she writes and how she sees herself. Born in Sudan then moving to Egypt before settling in Australia, each move was a drastic change, especially at a young age. That memory was encapsulated and to her, each place is saved and still in her mind as she always tries to put into words the accumulation of those times.

Akelo expressed those experiences in the second poem “Lost in Translation” where she voices over the words that speak of her time in Sudan and Egypt.

“I find myself boundless, like Sudan once was”

Appears in the scene a man whose hair is being braided by Akelo’s character, listening and interacting with the poem that speaks of memories of her childhood, family, and distortion between cultures and being a black child in Egypt.

“I was the baby of the war. A reminder of better things”

“Lost in Translation” portrays a very emotional display of Akelo’s childhood in Egypt while struggling with identity, language, and her family’s positioning in a foreign country that can not be described as friendly to outsiders.