How Nadir Nahdi is giving a voice to third-culture kids like himself
“The young diaspora are searching for what makes them whole and want to understand who they are,” says Nadir Nahdi on the phone from Jakarta. He has just finished filming “Finding Nenek,” a documentary about the Indonesian grandmother he never met.
Young, handsome and filled with the vitality of life, Nahdi is a content creator on a mission: To reclaim misrepresented narratives, to reset the conversations around marginalized communities, and to travel the world seeking meaningful aesthetics. He is part of a third- culture generation that, faced with a hostile political environment in the West, is seeking answers elsewhere.
“For me, growing up in a British context in which I was always made to feel like this wasn’t my home — through passive aggressive questions like ‘ Where are you from?’ or from the mainstream media always alienating people from my community — I always thought that there was a place outside of Britain that would feel more like home. Indonesia, because of my heritage, was one of them.
“But travelling through it and learning and discovering things here, I learned that I’m not Indonesian either, even though it’s a huge part of who I am. I’m stuck in this difficult place of not being Western enough for the West, not Eastern enough for the East, but I’m something entirely new. I’m part and parcel of a generation of young people who don’t see boundaries and borders in the same traditional own narrative and build stories within that kind of prism. I want people to see someone like me, or a girl wearing hijab, as noble. If you flood this space with incredible stories that are relatable and very human, and you don’t play on what makes people different, instead you play on the human emotions that connect us, then those become so normal to see. And that’s the endgame for me. Seeing someone who’s different from us and not thinking anything of it. It’s just part and parcel of this eclectic world that we live in.”
Unusually in a social media world obsessed with brevity, Nahdi has embraced longer-form storytelling. His films, or vlogumentaries, sometimes run past the