In the early 1940s, Anaïs Nin was part of a literary group penning erotic novels for a dollar a day, amassing a series of short stories published as Little Birds in 1979, two years after her death. “I had a feeling that Pandora’s box contained the mysteries of woman’s sensuality, so different from man’s and for which man’s language was inadequate,” Nin said in the preface to her 1976 masterwork, The Delta of Venus.
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Though Nin’s efforts had a revolutionary effect, she was as much a liberator as perpetuator of white cultural hegemony. “As a teenager, Little Birds busted me out of cultural mores that I had grown up inside between the United States and the [Arabian] Gulf,” says artist, author, and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria (The Girl Who Fell to Earth). “Going back to it as an adult, I felt quite disturbed by viewpoints that were Orientalist, sexist, and racist.”
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In Al-Maria’s hands, Nin’s erotic vignettes have been transformed into the basis for Little Birds, a six-episode series airing August 4 on Sky Atlantic. A kaleidoscopic melodrama set inside the decadent “international zone” of Tangier, Little Birds presents a multi-perspective look at the lives of troubled American heiress Lucy Savage (Juno Temple), local dominatrix Cherifa Lamour (Yumna Marwan), impoverished English aristocrat Hugo Cavendish Smythe (Hugh Skinner), and Egyptian prince Adham Abaza (Raphael Acloque) in 1955, the year prior to Moroccan independence from France.
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