Seif Abdalla is a director, cinematographer and multidisciplinary artist whose work spans documentary, narrative and experimental cinema. He began his career in graphic design before pursuing filmmaking at the Los Angeles Film School. After graduating, he worked across the globe in documentaries for platforms like National Geographic and Vice, as well as branded content for clients including GQ, Lancôme, Adidas and Vogue. His debut feature documentary screened at international festivals in Cairo, Málaga, Amman and Austria.

We sat down with Seif to learn more about his latest short film, HANAA. Made in partnership with Runway Studios.

Play

Can you tell us about yourself and your background in film?

I’m a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist drawn to stories that live in the in-between – between memory and history, fiction and documentary, home and exile. My work wrestles with these contradictions, both thematically and aesthetically, and seeks to translate them into a cinematic, poetic experience.

My background is in visual storytelling, rooted in both graphic design and nonfiction filmmaking. Working in documentary taught me that cinema is a malleable medium – one that can be interrogated, reshaped and reimagined. I’ve always been interested in the porous boundary between fiction and reality, and how blurring those lines can reveal deeper emotional truths.

I’m often drawn to nonlinear timelines and themes of belonging, displacement and familial love – especially through intimate portraits that reflect on the ambiguity of existence and the search for home.

HANAA is a beautiful film. Can you tell us more about it and why you made it?

Thank you so much – that means a lot.

HANAA is a cinematic portrait of a woman I deeply admire – my mother. It’s a meditation on her life across time: from her youth in Alexandria to motherhood, immigration and the act of starting over. The film blends personal memory with imagined reconstructions, using both live-action and AI-generated imagery to explore her emotional interior. It unfolds nonlinearly—anchored by recurring motifs like the sea, trains, corridors and windows overlooking distant horizons—all drawn from the landscapes of her childhood and mine.

I made this film to honor the quiet resilience of someone who never saw herself at the center of a story. For many immigrant women, especially mothers, life becomes a continuous act of sacrifice and reinvention – yet their stories often go unseen, or exist only in fragments. I wanted to create a space for that narrative to live and breathe—cinematically—through memory, longing and strength.

HANAA became a way to not only explore her life, but also the emotional inheritance passed between mother and child – what is said, what is left unsaid, what is carried forward. It was also a way to interrogate the medium itself – blending live-action and AI-generated imagery to blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction, between what is real and what is imagined.

In many ways, I think I became a filmmaker because of Hanaa. She always encouraged me to be a storyteller, and her story stayed with me for years—through different drafts and forms—until it found its right shape.

At its core, HANAA is about love—its endurance, its loss, its transformation—and the idea that home isn’t a fixed place, but something we carry with us, reconstruct and return to – again and again.

Tell us about your creative process – how did you come up with your ideas, and how did Runway’s tools play a role in shaping your workflows?

The creative process began with recognizing that my mother's story lived in fragments – old photos, conversations, memories shared across distance. I knew I wanted to preserve this, but the challenge was how to translate fragmented memory into cinema as visual poetry.

My approach started with writing. I would write scenes in a notebook—collecting visual fragments and working on emotional beats—trying to find the story's essence on paper before moving to digital creation. This preliminary work helped me understand that the film needed to feel like memory itself: nonlinear, symbolic, dreamlike.

I outlined HANAA beat by beat, designing it from the outset as a hybrid that would weave live-action and generated imagery. I created approximately 1,880 individual frames, constructing a panoramic portrait of her life rooted in 1970s Alexandria. These frames would serve as visual memory fragments.

My workflow became cyclical: sketch emotional beats, generate visual fragments, animate them through Runway, then weave them with live-action footage shot on Sony FX9. The editing process was designed to blur boundaries between generated and filmed content, creating a seamless emotional experience where viewers couldn't always distinguish between the two.

Runway's tools didn't just facilitate execution – they fundamentally shaped how I conceptualized the film's structure, allowing me to think in terms of animated memory fragments rather than traditional scenes.

You’ve been a filmmaker for a long time, but in more commercial spaces. What has AI unlocked for you when it comes to telling the stories you want to tell?

You’re right – commercial work sharpened my skills, but there were always deeper, more personal questions I longed to explore. AI has given me the space and tools to finally engage with those questions on my own terms. It’s allowed me to craft images that aren’t bound by budget or access, but by emotion, memory and metaphor.

With HANAA, I wanted to wrestle with complex themes that have shaped my life and artistic practice – questions of belonging, immigration and inheritance. What does it mean to start a life from scratch? What does it mean to immigrate – not just to leave a place, but to carry it with you, to find a new home without abandoning the old one? And what is home? Is it a geography, a room, a person or a feeling? Is it something you build – or something that builds you?

These are questions I’ve lived with, and AI has helped me explore them visually in ways I couldn’t before. It has enabled me to construct dreamlike spaces—liminal, symbolic, layered with memory—so I can ask those questions not just in words, but in images that linger and resonate.

Ultimately, AI hasn’t changed the heart of storytelling for me – it’s just expanded the form. It allows me to be more faithful to the complexity of what I feel, and what I remember.

Your use of light stuck out to me – you use the sun and its reflection (on mirrors, the ocean, etc.) throughout the film in various ways that really heighten the sense of emotion. How did you work with Runway’s tools to get the specific shots you wanted?

I wanted to capture the feeling of memory – the rush, the blur, the sudden clarity. Light is one of the few things I instinctively associate with memory. Not necessarily how it was, but how it felt. The color of a late afternoon on the wall, the way the sun flickered through a moving tram – those impressions stay with you, and they carry emotion in a way language sometimes can’t.

For me, light became an emotional language. I was intentional about using it to explore different chapters of Hanaa’s life – each one lit with a specific tone, texture or intensity. In a sense, every drop of light became a world unto itself. And just like a train passing through landscapes, the film moves through these memory-worlds – each window a fleeting glimpse, a pocket of time, a suspended emotion.

Runway’s Gen-4 was key in making this possible. The realism, the depth of texture, the responsiveness to nuanced prompts – it allowed me to guide the model intuitively. I wasn’t just describing a scene; I was chasing a feeling, and the model responded with an almost painterly sensitivity. It let me shape light as memory, light as mood, light as love.

In that way, the whole film became a moving train of memory—one window after another—lit not by fact, but by feeling.

You participated in the first Gen:48 competition, and I know you were considering leaving the film industry prior to that. What was it that reignited your passion for film?

Prior to discovering AI visual storytelling through Runway’s Gen-2, I was on the brink of leaving the film industry. I had spent years mastering technique, but I felt disconnected – like the interiority of my life, the emotional and existential complexities I carried, couldn’t be expressed in the formats available to me. The stories I most needed to tell—the ones about my loved ones, my history, my perception of reality—felt too nuanced, too eccentric, too personal to survive the traditional filmmaking process. I could write them down, but I couldn’t bring them to life. So they stayed on shelves, in notebooks, in silence.

Then I stumbled upon Gen-2 completely by chance. And everything changed. I immediately started experimenting. Dozens of short films emerged – quiet studies of memory, meditations on place, portraits of people I longed to honor.

It felt like I was speaking a visual language I had always known, but never had the tools to express. Runway’s tools opened doors I thought had been closed from the moment I chose filmmaking as a path. For the first time, I felt aligned—technically, emotionally, spiritually—with the stories I wanted to tell.

Participating in the first Gen:48 was both a culmination and a reawakening. It reminded me why I fell in love with cinema in the first place: because it can hold a human life, intimately and expansively, all at once. It was a potent return to purpose – and a new beginning.

Play

How has AI changed your approach and style when it comes to making films?

My approach to filmmaking has always been rooted in a visual and poetic sensibility. Before I ever picked up a camera, I came from a background in graphic design and fine art. I used to sketch scenes in my notebook—pencil drawings, fragments of poetry or prose—trying to find the essence of a story on paper first, before translating it digitally. Working with AI has, in a way, returned me to that process – but with a new level of nuance and precision. What once lived only in the margins of a notebook can now manifest with clarity. The control and responsiveness of these tools have made the stuff of dreams feel within reach – tangible, malleable.

As a filmmaker, I’ve always been interested in interrogating the medium itself. I’ve made experimental films, often using my phone, that blur fiction and nonfiction, films that lean into ambiguity and hybridity. HANAA is very much an extension of that – it’s a hybrid on a new frontier, where memory, reality and imagination coexist in the same visual space. It’s not about what’s factually accurate, but what’s emotionally true.

AI has allowed me to push and pull at the boundaries of form even further – to explore those fine lines where reality becomes interpretation, and memory becomes myth. I’m drawn to that tension. It’s where I feel most honest as an artist. These tools haven’t just changed my style – they’ve expanded the vocabulary with which I tell stories.

What’s next for you – what other stories do you want to tell?

I’d like to continue crafting intimate portraits – stories of people who may have never thought their lives were worth telling. There’s a quiet harrowing dignity in ordinary lives, familial love, compassion, and I want to honor that. I’m especially drawn to voices and histories that have been overlooked, to explore the complexity of identity, migration, memory and the search for belonging.

What excites me about these tools is their potential to deepen our relationship with reality – with life, with one another. They offer a new language – one that feels more inclusive, more fluid, more emotionally resonant. I want to use that language to tell stories that are both deeply personal and universally human.

Now more than ever, I think we need stories that slow us down, that open us up, that remind us of our shared longing and vulnerability. That’s what I hope to keep making.