Last Letter | Ari Nasser Ali
- withitgirl
- 5 days ago
- 12 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Yemeni-American filmmaker Ari Nasser Ali, who is also a surfer, embarked on a deeply personal quest that led to profound family healing and historical discovery. Her journey began with the search for a single, final letter—mailed in 1975 from Mombasa, Kenya, by her uncle, Ben Gamber, before his mysterious death.
What started as an attempt to find her uncle's last words quickly evolved into an excavation spanning over half a century and continents. Ari uncovered over 40 years of family correspondence, interviewed relatives and friends across two continents, and revealed that her family had lived through one of the most significant political upheavals of our time.
The resulting film also examines the particular costs borne by "third culture kids"—missionary children raised between worlds—and explores how silence around trauma impacts subsequent generations. The filmmaker learned that when families cannot discuss their deepest fears and sorrows, that pain echoes through the next generation in ways that are difficult to define.
Ultimately, this is a story about the courage to ask difficult questions, the power of breaking family silences, and how one person's search for truth can become a pathway to healing for an entire family system.
We met Ari at the screening of Wade in the Water, Part 1 at the SF MOMA in San Francisco last December 2024, where she briefly discussed her film project. Ben Between Africa will screen in San Diego on November 13th, 2025 at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park alongside Rachel Elizabeth Seed’s A Photographic Memory. Together, these deeply personal works explore universal themes of grief, intergenerational healing, memory, and belonging, offering a poignant reflection on how family histories and visual legacies shape our understanding of self.
So, let's get to know more about Ari.
Tell us about your background, your journey into filmmaking and surfing, and how these experiences have influenced your views on life, work, and community.
I was born and raised in Yemen. My mom is American but grew up in Ethiopia, and my father is Yemeni. Neither of them had TVs or movies in their childhood, so our access to them was limited to one VHS tape a year that a friend in the States would send over. It was usually a film that had come out many years prior. My sister and I would watch the shit out of these films and memorize every word and song. When we eventually moved to the U.S., I saw my first film in a theater, and I knew instantly that I wanted to be a filmmaker, that telling stories visually is what I wanted to do.
I just started surfing a little over a year ago. A close friend took some surf lessons through Traveler Surf Club in Pacifica, CA, and recommended I try it too. A few months later, I was visiting another friend in San Diego, and she lent me a wetsuit and a Wavestorm, and after my first paddle out, I was hooked.
One of the best things that happened to me a few months into surfing is that I went on a camping trip with QueerSurf, and discovered such an incredible community to help me navigate the basics of learning how to surf in a fun, friendly, and safe environment, my first camp was in Carlsbad in early November 2024 and I knew then that I would be leaving the bay area where I lived for almost 20 years and make the move down south.
I now live in North County San Diego, and one of the first people I connected with was Lex Weinstein, of Sea + Soil, a gardening and surf community, and it's through this group that I’ve met so many wonderful people to surf and cultivate a friend group whose values align with my own.
Share what surfing has taught you and how it influences your practice?
A year in, and I’m still very much in the early stages of learning how to surf. I ride an 8’0” with a 2+1 setup and love smaller, gentler waves. My best days are usually at San Onofre and Pipes.
About a month after moving here, I met my dawn patrol crew. There are about 8 of us, and initially surfing was the thing we had in common, but now we are all really good friends, celebrating birthdays and life accomplishments, and driving each other to the ER when a board or a stingray crosses our path. Surfing has this amazing ability to bring together people who might never have met otherwise, and I love that about it.
Surfing has been a game-changer for my mental space and my overall outlook on life. It’s helped me slow down and take each moment for what it has to offer, planning less and just being present to what is unfolding. Surfing is also one of the most humbling practices I’ve experienced, it’s helped me see how little control we actually have - one day I might feel like I'm really making progress and catching so many waves and other days I feel like the whirlpool of the ocean has other plans for me and I can’t let either one get to me, or place any self value on it. Surfing has taught me so much about gratitude, surrender, and letting go of expectations, and I’ve been trying to bring those lessons into other parts of my life.
Who are some of the individuals that inspire you, such as creatives, writers, and filmmakers? Can you mention specific films, books, or artworks, and what are you currently reading?
I tend to keep at least three books on my bedside table at all times. There’s a wisdom-based book I read from in the mornings, just a paragraph or two to help set my mindset for the day; a more narrative-driven book I read before bed (and usually fall asleep while reading); and an aspirational book that I fully intend to get to but often just admire from a distance.
Lately, I’ve been returning to Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender by David Hawkins. It’s a book that’s deeply influenced how I think about emotions, how we translate feelings into thoughts rather than simply allowing ourselves to feel them and release them. I find myself coming back to it again and again when I need to reconnect with presence and ease.
I just finished Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson, a queer coming-of-age story that still feels as vivid and relevant today as it did when it was first published in 1985. I first read it in high school and remember thinking the characters and situations were so relatable it could easily be adapted into a film. Revisiting it now, I’m struck by how timeless it feels in its exploration of sexuality, gender, and the constraints of growing up queer in a conservative religious environment.
One of my all-time favorite novels and one I often give to friends is The Desert of the Heart. The opening paragraph is so stunning that the first time I read it, I set the book down and went for a walk just to take it in. It’s a work I return to whenever I need to be reminded of the beauty of queer storytelling.
Creatively, I’m inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic. It feels like a five-hour motivational talk on creativity, an energetic reminder to have fun, stay curious, and let the creative process unfold naturally. I resonate with her perspective that creativity isn’t about control, but about staying open to what wants to emerge, something I try to apply both in my work and in surfing.
Recently, I subscribed to Everything is Political by Slow Factory, a monthly print (and online) newsletter that frames culture as a tool for liberation. Its essays argue that caring for people and the planet should never be seen as political, but as essential for our collective survival. I’ve found its perspective so grounding that it’s completely reshaped how I consume media. I’ve totally cut out mainstream news and instead seek out more intentional, independent voices that align with the values of care, justice, and creativity.
When it comes to movies, my taste is pretty eclectic. The Holy Mountain (1973) by Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of my all-time favorite films, along with Return to Oz (1982) and more recently The Favourite (2019) by Yorgos Lanthimos. For someone who loves film and storytelling, I don’t watch a lot of TV, unless I'm on a long flight.
How long did the film take to produce?
It took me about seven years to make Ben Between Africa — five years of filming on my own, followed by two years of full-time editing. Now I’m in the distribution phase, and since November 2024, I’ve been traveling across the U.S. to screen the film. We've done over 20 screenings and almost everyone has been sold out with some people coming to multiple screenings and that has been a huge motivator for me to keep going.
I began pursuing this story, the search for my late uncle’s final letter, in late 2017, after overhearing a rumor that he had sent it out just days before his mysterious death in 1975. One of the first lucky breaks came when I learned that my grandmother had left several boxes in the attic of her childhood farmhouse in Maryland, where my grandparents had returned after spending more than 25 years doing missionary work in Ethiopia.
A lucky break came early in the filmmaking process. I brought my camera with me to the Maryland farmhouse with zero expectations of finding anything, but I filmed anyway. What I found instead were boxes full of letters, photos, slides, unprocessed 8mm film, keepsakes, all of it sitting untouched in the attic for over forty years.
Before I was born my mom had left the church and organized religion and raised us very differently from how she had been raised. Growing up, I knew very little about her experiences as a missionary kid in boarding school, and even less about her older brother, Ben. So the discovery of the boxes in the attic was huge, it became the starting point of my journey to “unpack” my family’s story and try to understand who Ben was, how he died, and why my mom never spoke about him.
I was a one-person crew—filming, recording sound, and shaping the story as I went. After five years of shooting, I brought on an incredible editor, Adam Wilder, and that’s when the pressure really set in to make something out of all the footage I had gathered.
The biggest challenge for me was learning not to overthink how everything would come together, but to trust the process. Over two years of editing, we finally reached a cut where we felt like we truly understood the story. Then we realized we had to reshoot almost all of the B-roll that included me. Because the film had taken five years to shoot, that footage was inconsistent, I looked different, lived in different places, and had shifted my creative approach over time. In the end, we decided to reshoot all the B-roll with me in it in one location, so that I could appear consistent throughout.
My advice to other filmmakers is to trust yourself. It’s your art, your vision, so turn off all the noise, especially the voices in your own head, and follow your instincts. Looking back, I’m grateful that I was able to make this film in my own little silo, with limited feedback outside of working closely with my editor. As a first-time feature director, I needed that space to find and hone my voice. Now that I’m more confident in my instincts, I’m excited to make my next film with greater institutional support, funders, grants, and workshops, and to bring collaborators into the process earlier on.
Were there some themes or ideas that did not make it into film?
When I first started making this film, I never intended for it to be a personal film. My initial idea was to focus on the larger story of Mennonite Missionaries in Ethiopia and how that interweaving of two very different cultures affected the lives of the missionaries and the Ethiopians. My uncle’s final letter was always on my mind but it took a few years of filming before I realized that the search for the letter and how what I was discovering about my own family’s unprocessed grief was the centerpiece of the story. It seems obvious in hindsight but almost all finished pieces feel that way.
What was the editing process like?
The process of shooting the film taught me a lot about the craft of filmmaking, and then the editing of the film over the course of two years taught me a lot about the small chipping away discipline of storytelling.
My editor lived about 2 hours away, so we worked remotely 90% of the time. The very first thing we did was I sent my editor a huge hard drive with all my footage on it, and he spent about two months just watching it, getting up to speed on what we had to work with.
And then we met for a weekend at a friend's co-working studio, and we put a huge piece of paper on the wall and plotted out the entire film - what we understood our story to be at that point. It was a paper edit before it was a digital one. We did this about three to four more times throughout the process of editing.
We started out by putting together individual scenes until we had most of the film plotted out. This took us about a year and was very stressful because the movie doesn’t work for a very long time before you arrange the puzzle pieces a hundred different ways and then eventually it starts coming together.
Tells us more about the artistic direction.
My editor and I have backgrounds as experimental filmmakers and photographers and we both wanted to bring that element into the film to help visually illustrate the feeling of there being something unseen to illuminate and bring to the surface. We would watch lots of films together during this period and then dissect them, what worked and why. A film that ended up really inspiring us was Wood and Water (2021) by Jonas Bak, a beautiful observational film whose visual language really nailed what we were going for. We made a pretty big decision at this point and removed about 50% of the film's b-roll and decided to reshoot all of it with a very specific and intentional visual language that was more abstract and observational. This influenced the shots of me on my journey of discovery and also we added in a lot more shots that would represent the unseen things all around us like dust particles that are only revealed when light hits them just right. We also decided to shoot a lot of moments out of focus, as I get closer to understanding the underlying sources of my family’s fracture, the shots become more in focus, and in the last 3rd of the film, that method is totally gone, and everything is very sharp.
Many people have commented on my use of a typewriter in the film—a choice I made very early on. It was inspired by the fact that, when I first began searching for Ben’s final letter, I found myself talking to him in my head. I’d be on my way to interview one of his college friends and catch myself thinking, Ben, I can’t believe I’m about to meet your friend. How strange it must be for you that I’m talking to all these people who loved you.
For a long time, the film was actually called Dear Ben, because it felt like one long letter I was writing to him about my journey to find his last letter. This project would never have existed without the hundreds of letters my grandmother had saved, and it felt only right to continue that family tradition—to write to Ben as a way of staying connected.
I was living in Sacramento when I decided to include a typewriter in the film. One morning, I went to a garage sale and almost instantly found the perfect one. It felt like a small moment of divine intervention—one of many throughout the process—and the typewriter truly felt like something Ben himself might have owned.
Now that the film is out in the world, is there anything new that has been revealed you want to share with us.
Something special keeps happening at screenings. I’ll ask if anyone in the audience knew Ben, and often someone will stand up—someone who knew him well—and share a story or offer their thoughts on my portrayal of him. Since I never knew Ben myself, I always find myself wondering, Did I get him right?
What’s been even more surprising over this past year of traveling and screening the film is how my understanding of my mom’s experience continues to deepen—how growing up in boarding school and being separated from her family at such a young age created ripple effects that reached into my own life and relationships. That inner journey has only expanded as the film draws more and more former missionary kids and third-culture kids to the screenings. When they share their own stories during Q&As, my understanding of those intergenerational effects grows even deeper. I’ve realized that this isn’t just a story about my family, it’s a story about the lasting effects of family separation and religious trauma, but also about the beauty and complexity of growing up between worlds.
What music or podcasts are you listening to these days?
I’ve been listening to music recently that is fun and light-hearted. I think a necessary balance to how heavy a time we are living through.
Here are a few playlists and podcasts I’d love to share .
HeavyWeight : great storytelling
Ghost of a podcast : Astrology & Advice Bay Area-based astrologer, love her take on things
Rough Cut : Conversations with doc filmmakers about their creative process
Additional Information
IG: @captainaali
Full Film Screening: 11.13.25 (Museum of Photographic Arts-San Diego) and available to stream 12.13 - 12.3.25
Get Tickets at: https://tinyurl.com/1113MOPA
Philip Briggs @photophilbriggs
AK Kirkpatrick: @akkirkpatrick
Nhu Ngo: @nhu_ng_
Adam Wilder: VOIX productions
Rebecca George: @bethewords
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