I spent a hundred days in a desert village near Dubai, while filming Bedouins of the Wind.
I thought I was making a film. And maybe I was. But somewhere between the desert winds and the long drives back to Dhaid, between the sand in my shoes and the silence after filming, something else started writing itself. Something slower. Something quieter. Not a script. Not a sequel. Not even a memoir.
A book. 207 pages. 22,933 words.
Not about the film. But from it.
Not a companion. But a consequence.
What began as a visual story about a man, his camels, and a way of life, slowly blurred into words. Not because it had to, but because it couldn’t help it. Because some moments don’t fit in a frame. They need a line break.
I had never made a film before. And I have never written a book before either.
Blurring lines, breaking frames
We’ve seen it for years now — books that read like films. Films that feel like poems.
The line between medium and message is dissolving. And maybe it should.
Our lives aren’t consumed in categories. We don’t remember in formats. We remember in fragments, in feelings, in flashes of color and voice and regret and smell. So why should a story stay in one form?
Some of my favorite books are cinematic.
Some of my favorite films are literary. And I’ve stopped trying to separate the two.
The only real genre left, I came to realize, is your voice. In as many forms as you can put out into the world.
The frame before the page
I never set out to write a book. That’s for sure. The camera was enough. Barely enough, in fact. I filmed alone, with no crew, no script, no form — just instinct and obsession. I followed my dear friend Abdulaziz Al Tunaiji, who I have known for a decade, into his world of pre-dawn camel walks, open-air races, quiet council meetings under stars, and the slow rituals of desert life.
I thought that was the story. And it was.
But when the last scene was cut and I played the film back in full, it felt complete — and also unfinished. Like an echo without its source. The visuals captured life, but the questions lingered elsewhere. In me. In the pauses I hadn’t filmed. In the conversations that never happened. In the moments too sacred to put on screen.
So I began writing. At least, trying to write. Not to explain the film. But to remember what it never said out loud.
Where film ends and memory begins
There’s something about editing footage late at night that messes with your sense of time. You start to see patterns where none were planned. You notice gestures — an old man lifting a cup with both hands, a child brushing sand off her slippers — that never seemed important while filming, but now hold weight.
Stills from the documentary Bedouins of the Wind © Danish Farhan 2024
That was the shift. The same desert, the same Bedouins, the same camels — but now I was inside the story, not just documenting it.
And the memories weren’t chronological anymore. They drifted. They overlapped. They contradicted. And for that, I needed paragraphs.
The pages that followed
Somewhere in this drift between lens and language, the book began to take shape. Bedouins of the Wind: One Hundred Years is not an adaptation. It’s not a transcript. It’s not even a behind-the-scenes commentary. It’s a reimagining.
Structured in three parts, the book mirrors the rhythm of the experience — not the film. See more here.
Excerpts from the book © Danish Farhan 2025
Part I — 100 Years Behind Us
Eleven long-form chapters that reach back in time. I write about borders before maps, falcons before drones, the poetry that defined identity, and how the word “Arab” didn’t come from land or blood, but language. It’s a meditation on origin stories — both theirs and mine. There was so much I had discovered along the way, and nowhere to put it.
Part II — 100 Days Among Them
These are short, observational fragments from my 100-day immersion. A man fixing his thobe with fishing wire. A boy reciting poetry to his camel. A moment of silence between two men at the start of the race. Each entry ends with a modern contrast — what I would have done in my world — and a quiet question I left behind.
Part III — 100 Lessons for Tomorrow
One hundred lessons distilled from the experience. Not teachings. Not prescriptions. Just observations that took root in me. About stillness. About pride. About grief. About barefoot leadership. Each lesson is a small lantern.
The book is not about the Bedouins. It’s what the desert taught me while I was looking the other way.
Writing in the gaps
The earliest notes weren’t meant to become chapters. They were voice memos, field notes, WhatsApp messages to myself. I would jot lines down on the back of race programs, on feed bags, or into my phone while driving back to the city in silence.
There’s one memory I kept returning to — a moment that didn’t make it into the film. Two men, Abdulaziz’s father and his uncle, no younger than 70, walking around the camel farm. They didn’t speak. Not once. Not even eye contact. Just a perfect rhythm of shared history, like a dance that had been practiced for decades.
I remember filming them from a distance, then turning the camera off. It didn’t feel right to capture more. But the moment wouldn’t leave me. Days later, I wrote it out — not what I saw, but what I felt. And that’s when I realized: the book wasn’t a decision. It was a response.
Shot in frames, told in lines
The film gave me characters.
The book gave them souls.
On camera, Abdulaziz is stoic. Proud. Measured. But in writing, I could finally explore the layers I had sensed but never filmed — his grief over an injured camel, his quiet angst/glee at modernization, his excitement about what his five daughters would do with this ancient way of life.
Film is beautiful for what it withholds. But writing let me reveal what we both avoided saying.
And maybe that’s the truest difference — the lens observes from the outside. But language enters inside.
The film as field journal
People sometimes ask if I had a script. I didn’t. But I had 100 hours of footage, thousands of stills, and a silent agreement with the land that if I watched long enough, it would speak.
That footage became more than scenes. It became a field journal. And when I watched it again — months later, quietly, alone — I realized I had been writing the book all along. Just with images first.
Some entries in the book are lifted straight from scenes I cut from the film. Others are born from what happened after the camera was put down. But all of them were in there, waiting.
Reflections are a circle
I made a film because I wanted to preserve something. I wrote a book because I wanted to understand it.
The film was a gift to the Bedouins — a way to show their world without explaining it. The book is a conversation with myself — about what it meant, why it moved me, and what I’m still struggling to say.
Together, they complete the circle.
One is dust. The other is echo.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Bedouins of the Wind: A Hundred Years by Danish Farhan is a poetic chronicle of memory, silence, and belonging in the Arabian desert. Told from the perspective of both insider and outsider, the book is a tribute to a culture where identity is passed down not through words, but through the way people live.
Non-fiction, memoir, cultural documentary
207 pages. Available in print and digital soon.
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