A YOUNG HIGH-END COURIER BRUSHING SHOULDERS WITH LONDON'S LISTENING-BAR GOING, FIVE-STAR HOTEL LURKING ELITE IS SNATCHED INTO THE CITY'S MYSTICAL UNDERWORLD WHEN HE FINDS HIMSELF CARRYING A DELIVERY SEALED WITH A SPIRITUAL INCANTATION.
CAST:
JUDE CARMICHAEL AS “KHADIM AL RASUL II”
OUIDAD ELMA AS “LA SAINTE DE SOUTH KEN.”
MARTIN ASKEW AS “MUNKAR”
JABIR KHAMMAL AS “NAKIR”
SEYDINA “NOREYNI” NDIAYE AS “MR. MUHAMMAD”
GEORGIE LOLITA WALLACE AS “THE QUEEN OF LONDON”
ORLANDO DEVAUX AS “SHAYTAN”
CREW:
WRITTEN + DIRECTED BY RAZA TARIQ
PRODUCED BY RAZA TARIQ AND MARTIN ASKEW
EXECUTIVE PRODUCED BY LEON HADY AND NICOLE PURIN
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ALLAH
GAFFER / GRIP: ORLANDO DEVAUX
SPARK: KHADIJA TARIQ AND SAYEEDA ALI
SOUND RECORDIST: SAIF-UR-REHMAN MANZOOR-KHAN
SOUND ASSIST: KHADIJA TARIQ
COSTUME DESIGN: ALLAH
STYLING AND SOURCING: RAZA TARIQ
COSTUME CONSULT: ZAKIR KHAN
ON-SET PSYCHOSPIRITUAL COORDINATOR: AMINA HAJJAJ THOMSON
CAB DRIVER: TREVOR RILEY
EDITOR: RAZA TARIQ
COLOURIST: ADAM MEARS
HEAD OF COLOUR PRODUCTION: CHARLIE MORRIS
COLOUR PRODUCER: SARAH BANKS
SOUND MIX: RAZA RARIQ
MUSIC FROM THE ACTION AND MIGHTY BABY
ARTIST STATEMENT
FUTUH AL GHUYUB is an accidental proof of concept for the aesthetic, spiritual and cosmopolitan tropes explored in my debut feature, SPITTING FEATHERS. My manager, producer and I had long been trying to make a short film that showed the blinding lights its treatment talked about, and its curling Cockney-cum-Caliphate coded slang. But we kept running into walls. Financiers gone cold, actors' schedules booked, DP's flown out last minute to shoot Sundance Labs features. It felt an impossible hurdle to climb.
Fast forward to late 2025. After opening two sister solo exhibitions back-to-back, I found myself exhausted and staring down the barrel of one of my life's greatest, most altering changes yet. My life felt like it was about to end. I found myself thinking: forget SPITTING FEATHERS, forget the five other feature films I've got planned. Cause I might not even see tomorrow. To return to a state of absolute shivering vulnerability, where all that matters is surviving to tomorrow.
The thought percolated. These grand aesthetic ideas I have for SF: the 70s, 2020s steampunk London, the Liam Gallagher cues and the Kung Fu shoes; the dub, Dean Blunt, trance score; The Stone Roses to The Natural History Museum acid house rave scene – could that all die with me if I departed tomorrow? So I thought, I needed to make something now. Like right now. Something I could shoot myself, handheld, with no crew. Something that corralled what I had, rather than what I wanted.
My closest actor friends were always symbols and metaphors to me, and now I wrote their characters. I grabbed Ouidad a Eurostar ticket and the rest worked for free, carrying kit between locations, carrying me through an Odyssey, along with one production assistant per day. The characters were quite literally making the film; the seedy spiritual funk world I had inhabited, these were what the people felt like, not looked like. The divine light black and white of SPITTING FEATHERS, this is how you'd explain it if the film never got made. The costume, the lingo, the scenes with invisible symbolic cocaine, and prayers that cast spells you can't see – this was it turned up to 10x, compressed in a 26-minute .mov. If I was gonna go, this was my will. It turns out, it was will. It was Allah's will. Absolute Unicity. A theophany of Lights. Disco.
The film assembles Islamic mythological figures in present-day apparitional form, shaped through direct consultation with specialists. In the Prophetic and Sufi traditions, angels, saints and jinn are said to be able to morph into various appearances. My choice to present the interrogating angels of the grave, MUNKAR and NAKIR, as two London gangsters from a bygone era dropped into the present day, imagines their transposition into the real world. Ouidad Elma plays LA SAINTE DE SOUTH KEN., riffing off traditional Sufi saints like Rabia Al Adawiyya, traditional healers who operated through veils and coded language. The inherent psychedelic shape-shifting nature of these sacred images lends itself to characters who in the present day might present as outsiders.
The film was written last November on Azahara International permaculture farm in Granada, home to a Sufi community founded in Notting Hill in the 70s. Members include the bands Mighty Baby, The Action, and artists Robert Spiker, Nooredeen Durkee, and Daniel Abdulhayy Moore. I was inspired by their psychedelic journey through drugs and music into spirituality and eventually orthodox Sufism, guided by their meeting with the Moroccan Saint Sidi Muhammad Ibn Al Habib, who initiated them in the Darqawi Sufi order. That order was founded by 18th-century mystic Muhammad al-Arabi al-Darqawi in the village Bou Brih. incidentally, Ouidad and Jabir (who plays NAKIR) are both from this village in the Rif. We only found out on set. Ouidad's grandfather was a renowned Sufi in the Rif during the 20th century.
LA SAINTE's final form as a heart-hotline operating therapist is inspired by the real Amina Hajjaj Thomson, my therapist and wife of one of the Notting Hill 70s Sufis. She pioneered an Islamic psychological approach called Heartfulness in the 90s. Amina is a direct descendant of 11th-century Moroccan Sufi saint Muhammad ibn Nasir al-Dar'i, whose prayer was read repeatedly during the anti-colonial liberation of Morocco. The Khalwa (spiritual isolation) scene was shot in her home, overseen by her; she dressed Ouidad in her own clothes, tied the headscarf in the traditional Khalwati way, and lit the bakhoor incense herself.
Martin Askew, who plays MUNKAR, was an actual East End gangster in the 90s before becoming Muslim, documented in his film Snow In Paradise (2014). I went to high school in East London not far from where Martin grew up. I knew Jude (KHADIM AL RASUL II) through attending nearby high schools in East London, before our creative lives. We only reconnected years later at a Telfar party at The Standard Hotel, finding each other now in a new milieu. Once the chicken shop after school, now served burger sliders on the top floor – simultaneously bonding over our dissociation from the vapid scene and a shared desire for meaning. I met Martin and Jabir at a Sufi gathering, with no idea they were involved in the film world. Jabir's older brother is Nez Khammal (See It, Say It, 2024), who became a mentor and inadvertently led me to my manager. I was being haunted.
MR MUHAMMAD is played by Seydina Ndiaye, a member of the Baye Fall of the Mouride Sufi order I belong to. The litany he recites on the box is a real occult talismanic incantation from our Shaykh in Senegal.
I met the executive producer, Leon Hady, at a Sudanese Sufi ritual ceremony called a Hadra, the same gathering Martin and Jabir attend, led by once teacher to Cassius Clay; Sheikh Babikir. Leon became a spiritual mentor. Only after the film was finished did Leon tell me he had met Shaytan in a dream, who offered him a box. In the film, Shaytan appears as a figure of light to the protagonist, asking for his box. Leon also told me he had met Munkar and Nakir after reaching a spiritual state through Hadra. He said my depiction was not far off.
DIRECTOR BIO
RAZA TARIQ (b. 2002) is a conceptual artist and filmmaker from London. His work explores transcultural ideas around the unseen. His narrative short film 'TAMING A SEAHORSE' premiered at LSFF. His debut feature film is in development with Sam Hudson Brown (42mp) and Sid Gupta (Lionsgate UK). He is the 2026 Artist-in-Residence at arebyte Digital Art Centre, a writer for Dazed MENA Magazine and one of the V&A East Museum's inaugurating Makers.
He has screened three times at London Short Film Festival and five times at NFFTY. He was a 2021 Satellite Films' Arts Council remote artist resident, a 2022-23 Soho House Foundation fellow, and part of the Fishtank Workshop & Gallery resident cohort in 2024-25. His narrative short film 'TAMING A SEAHORSE' (2023) starred Bridgerton's Calam Lynch and Olivier Award-winning MBE Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, and was distributed by Minute Shorts. He has performed at Rally Festival 2024 (Southwark Park), the Soho House Festival 2022 (Gunnersbury Park), Reference.Point-180 and Bomb Factory Foundation Holborn. He was Resident DJ at the legendary Notting Hill Arts Club. His work has been curated in the screenings of Zahra Khan, the curator of the 59th Venice Biennale Pakistan Pavilion 2019, and the exhibitions of Jarelle Andre Francis, assistant curator at Tate Modern. His work has been covered in THE FACE Magazine, Crack Magazine, GUAP and by the V&A Museum. He has published essays in New Currency Magazine and DAZED Middle East.