ABJAD HAWAZ (أبجد هوز)

Abjad Ḥawaz (أبجد هوز) takes its name from the ancient ordering of the Arabic alphabet. Through the body of Salma Zahore, each letter is danced and embodied in the ruins of Barcelona. Blending fashion, music, poetry, and performance, the film reclaims a language often feared and misunderstood, turning it into a celebration of identity, resilience, and artistic freedom.

Director Biography - Hadi Moussally

Hadi Moussally is a Lebanese-French filmmaker with two master’s degrees in Fiction and Documentary/Anthropological Cinema from Paris. In 2015, he co-founded the production company h7o7, dedicated to creating and promoting hybrid works blending fashion, experimental, documentary, and fiction. In 2020, he launched Hybrid Wave, a collective of over 30 international hybrid artists. His bold and genre-defying films have earned him more than 60 awards and over 500 official film festival selections worldwide.

Director Statement

"Abjad Ḥawaz" (أبجد هوز) is the traditional ordering of the Arabic alphabet once widely used in older times.

Abjad Ḥawaz was born from a moment of violence hidden in the everyday. One afternoon, while walking through the streets of Paris, I was wearing a T-shirt with the words “Kebab World Tour” written in Arabic, something playful, even absurd. Yet a passerby looked at me and spat: “Islamiste de merde” (“Fucking Islamist”).

At first, I hoped he was speaking to someone else, maybe on the phone. But when I turned, I saw him standing there, staring straight at me. I froze. I asked myself: Did I hear correctly? Should I react? But I knew that if I overreacted, I would instantly become the extremist he already imagined me to be. In that moment, I realized the paradox I live with: no matter how I respond, I lose. Always fighting, already condemned.

From this wound comes my fascination with the Arabic language itself. Once celebrated as one of the most beautiful, poetic, and rich languages in the world, it has now become, for some, a trigger for fear, suspicion, even hate. How did we get here? How can a language filled with history, philosophy, and art, an entire cultural cosmos, be reduced to a threat?

With Abjad Ḥawaz, I want to explore this paradox. To reclaim the language and its beauty. To ask: how do we build a world where people are accepted for who they are, instead of being branded and diminished by prejudice? Because if I am an Arab, does that automatically make me a terrorist?

At the center of the film is Salma Zahore, my alter ego, a queerture that destabilizes gender, identity, and belief. She inhabits an in-between world: Tres Xemeneies in Barcelona, a place people call Chernobyl, where ruins meet the near future. Here, Salma is dressed in the transformative designs of Jef Montes, embodying a skin that resists categorization. To the music Abjad Ḥawaz by Salma & Louise (Salma Zahore & Louise from Scratch), she will dance, her movements celebrating the Arabic language, each gesture embodying the form of a letter. What was once feared becomes alive. The body itself becomes language.

Abjad Ḥawaz is both a wound and a reclamation: a film that asks what it means for language itself to become dangerous, and how, through art, movement, and beauty, we might transform fear into resilience, and prejudice into celebration.