Director’s Statement

I arrived in Baltimore in 2013, as a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University while beginning my Ph.D. in film studies at the Sorbonne University. Fascinated by the city, I stayed. For four years.

I wanted to understand the particular character of each neighborhood and the nature of the invisible boundaries between them which, I later learned, are the legacy of redlining practices.

I wanted to explore the city’s images and dig into its local archives. I became fascinated by the colors of its murals, which beautify decaying buildings. I met street artists who want to change their city, discovered its local art scene, its jazz history, its Club Music. I came to love Baltimore’s sounds during the summer. Its fireflies, its quirkiness, its mystery. I started diving into Baltimore’s past to better understand its present.

Lights of Baltimore is the result of five years' questioning of a city I came to call home.

This film was made with little funding but great support. Making a documentary was an incredible journey, and I am grateful to my team, friends, mentors, supporters, but mostly the Baltimore communities who keep fighting and stay resilient despite all the challenges they face.

This documentary is my personal vision of a city that I hope Baltimoreans will recognize as their own. I hope those who have never been there will feel drawn to visit. 

My hope is that stories of some of the people who are helping to build Baltimore’s future will enable audiences to understand all that is at stake, deepen their empathy for those they think they already know, and, more challenging still, foster empathy for those they did not previously understand.

Sabrina Bouarour

the Director/producer

Sabrina Bouarour is a French independent filmmaker with strong ties to Baltimore. After teaching film theory and filmmaking at Johns Hopkins University, La Sorbonne Nouvelle, Columbia University, and Gustave Eiffel University, she is now a lecturer at the University of London Institute in Paris.

She holds a PhD in film and media studies from La Sorbonne Nouvelle and graduated from L'Ecole Normale Supérieure (rue d'Ulm), and the CFJ (school of journalism) in Paris. The articles she wrote as a journalist appeared in a wide variety of publications including Le Monde and So Film.

She is a Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund Fellow and has been supported by the Maryland Humanities, the Roy W. Dean Foundation ("2016 Hot films in the making"), the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the Ile-de-France Region (FORTE), the SACEM (Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music), and the SCAM (The Civil Society of Multimedia Authors). In 2016, she founded Flying Impalas, a Baltimore-based film company. Lights of Baltimore is her first feature film.