Nothing But a Name

Date of Award

5-10-2026

Date Published

6-18-2026

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

Film and Media Arts

Advisor(s)

Soudabeh Moradian

Second Advisor

Laura Heyman

Abstract

This practice-led thesis develops a mode of filmmaking that inverts the observational gaze often trained on marginalized communities to instead witness their interiority, labor, and survival. The film, Without.a.Halt, confines its narrative to the interior of a rideshare car, where Ali, a South Asian Muslim driver living under a name not his own, navigates one escalating encounter with a passenger. The car functions not as a vehicle of mobility but as a space of confinement — where economic precarity, systemic pressure, and social prejudice converge. Drawing on Hamid Naficy’s theory of accented cinema, Junaid Rana’s analysis of race and labor among migrant workers, and Erving Goffman’s framework of impression management, the thesis argues that dominant cinema has systematically reduced its subjects to flattened stereotypes — erasing their interiority, their labor, and their quiet dignities. The film refuses that reduction, using the camera to witness what dominant narratives obscure: the faith, the fatigue, the performance, and the cost of surviving on the margins. What does survival cost when visibility itself becomes a liability? This thesis answers that question not in argument, but in form.

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