Z (Working Title)
a documentary film by Sabah Z. & Sara Yang
Project Stage: Development
Logline
After an Oakland artivist and athlete experiences partial paralysis, she asks how the water can allow her body to remember. Exploring the elements, psychedelics, and ancestral memory: her return to water is an unveiling of how trauma transmutes in our bodies, and what it takes to heal individually and collectively.
Story Summary
In the winter of the pandemic, Sabah Z. (Zabah) began to swim in the waters of the San Francisco Bay. The chill of the Pacific Ocean had never appealed before, especially compared with the waters she had grown up with in South Florida. Somehow the solitude of lockdown as a single new mother forced a new existence, calling her back to the water in unexpected ways.
Within the next couple years, her world began to glitch. Where before she moved through the world as a fully able-bodied mother, artist, surfer, swimmer, and more — her movements began to delay. Perhaps it started with the toxins released in her apartment building after a flood. Perhaps it was from the car accident. Perhaps it was the memory from the seven years, or seven generations, back. A clinical perspective might call it a progressive neuromuscular condition, a mystery illness without much of a treatment path in sight. A critical & intersectional perspective might name it as compounding trauma from all directions, commingled with the chronic and systemic stress of a white supremacist, capitalist, heteropatriarchal, environmentally diseased world. From a life of able-bodied independence, Sabah found herself in a new reality: one where she needed support with all ADLs (activities for daily living).
This film follows Sabah as she searches for her own healing, beyond the diagnoses of a Western medical system. She turns toward the elements and the wisdom of the body. She infuses her body with air, submerging weekly into a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and willing the oxygenated blood to restore movement to her system. She cultivates fire, sipping the traditional Chinese medicinal herbs that might stoke the flow of qi. She harvests the medicine of the earth through psilocybin, wondering if a hero’s dose might open the window for her mind and muscles to fire.
As a longtime member of the Oakland arts, medicine, and social justice communities: she explores how culture and community keep us alive. Together, she and her community prefigure cultures of care that cannot yet be imagined by a patriarchal, racist, capitalist, ableist, heteronormative world. Across appointments with chiropractors, therapists, and death doulas: she navigates isolation, raises a care team, and confronts the edges of an overwhelmed, individualized, capitalist society.
Five years after the winter of the pandemic, Sabah begins to ask if returning to the water might help her body remember. From water therapy pools, to beginning to train for the 2028 Paralympics, she begins to reconnect with her own body of water — hoping that one day, she can make it back to the oceans that used to set her free. The water becomes a passage forward and back: both a site of ancestral memory with those who came across land and water to become diaspora; and a place of stillness and movement as Sabah turns toward her own mortality. Together with the water, she contemplates the nature of interbeing, and how we transform infinitely.
Topic Summary
Starting in 1994, Emoto Masaru began to experiment with water, exposing it to various words, music, or intentions and freezing it to study the resulting crystalline forms. He found the water responded to positive frequencies with harmonious, symmetric patterns; compared with distorted shapes from negative words. His inquiry reminds us of what water holds. And with the majority of the human body being made of water, it’s no wonder the body keeps the score (Bessel van der Kolk).
If our bodies are made of water, then just like Masaru’s study: in response to positives or negatives, perhaps our cells resonate — or distort — like crystalline forms. This points to a critical, intersectional view on how chronic, systemic stress of an oppressive world manifests and transmutes as trauma and illness in our bodies. Rather than accepting a clinical diagnosis of an untreatable progressive neuromuscular condition, Sabah asks how the water can allow her body to remember. Her dialogue with the water becomes a connecting practice with not just the elements, but with source. Where systems of oppression undermine ancestral practices of connection, and disconnect us from our story, emotions, body, and source: Sabah’s process of becoming water helps us remember how restoring these waterways is liberatory (Monica Dennis, Rachael Ibrahim).
Interwoven with Sabah’s journey of water is her ongoing search for healing beyond the Western medical industrial complex. Where clinical perspectives flatten diagnoses, her journey is an affirmation of how wellbeing is rooted in identity, culture, community, and spirituality. As psychedelics experience a “renaissance” characterized by whiteness and clinical / academics, we bring an intersectional perspective: bridging science and indigenous wisdom, as Sabah navigates healing across modalities. With the Black & Indigenous-led Oakland medicine community, Sabah deepens with plant medicines and knowledge systems that have been stewarded by indigenous peoples from time immemorial.
Sabah and her community prefigure cultures of disability justice and care that cannot yet be imagined by a racist, capitalist, ableist, heteronormative world. Oakland exists at thresholds: constantly pushing what the future might look like today. Yet in prefiguring culture, it’s essential to visibilize its complexity. This includes how community shows up — and falls short — in practicing radical care, disability justice, and interbeing.
For Sabah, the water becomes a portal — to her body, source, and collective memory. She continues to ask the medicine if she can restore her body to movement and vitality — or if there is no such reality as a return to “normal,” for “the only lasting truth is change” (Octavia Butler). Guided by the expansion of birth and death through medicine journeys, Sabah begins to probe the nature of her own mortality. In dialogue and deep listening with source, against a societal backdrop that still holds death with fear: Sabah and the water explore the infinite nature of transmutation and life.