Captured with that distinctive Super-8 tint, a crowd of thousands jostle to catch a glimpse of the man himself as he makes his way into the mosque. This is a scene that should be etched into north –east folk-memory, for Ali's ceremony took place in our very own South Shields mosque. gharavi is shocked when I tell her that my South Shields born and bred Dad couldn't remember the big day. 'What! Was he in a coma or something?' But part of her mission is to record these fantastic stories that are on the brink of being lost.

gharavi prefers to show rather than tell, illustrating her passionate chat with meditative, touching and funny clips. 'There he is', she gestures towards Ali, 'in South Shields, at the town hall. He said, “I'll always remember how many people were rooting for me here.”' Her interview with Ali's daughter is powerful; she confirms how much the north-east wedding meant to her parents, that it was the real thing. gharavi affectionately describes the film as 'my love song to Ali' and it was through this labour of love that she drew closer to the fourteen Yemeni Muslim men whose spoken histories she recorded on video. She began 'looking at the history of the community through the prism of Ali.'

Over the last one-hundred-and-twenty years, seamen from Yemen have successfully settled in the region and made it their home. 'In one sense it's a very positive story of integration and that's a very difficult story to tell. To tell stories you often need drama.' But the laid back, conversational quality of her oral histories is their strength: they work in gentle counterpoint to the general media focus on terrorists, fundamentalism and fear. Even so, within the everyday stories are moments of pure heroism. Take the story told by Mohammad Nasser, a Royal Navy crewman tortured during the Falklands War. He describes his capture, his legs cut and salt rubbed into the wounds, but then with a mischievous grin Nasser shows off his Royal Navy papers – 'This is it... Nobody believes it till they see it. I love it. I lived a good life with this.' 'And he showed us the scars' gharavi continues, 'Tyneside lost the largest proportion of Merchant Navy in the war, World War Two, the Battle of the Atlantic.

Three thousand men were lost but one quarter of those men were Yemeni... the graves are pretty much the only place you can read the history. You see these amazing stories, like Dorothy Ali, who married Hassan Ali in 1943 and you just think, who's that, what was her life like?' gharavi's curiosity and enthusiasm is contagious as she talks about the impact filming had on her. 'The films change me... they are my way of looking into things. As a woman I wouldn't have been able to have this engagement with these men, but the camera gives you permission.'

Influential in the final cut was gharavi's sense of responsibility towards the stories of men like Mohammad Nasser. 'When I started I thought that I'd use little bits in a documentary, but then it was like, how do you cut? Who chooses who's going to say what? So the idea was really simple, to let them speak to you and you can listen to their stories for as long as you like.' She reflects on her decision not to edit these films, 'That's probably just the purest form of documentary, put your rushes out there and let the audience say, “I get this” or “I get that”.' Sadly, Nasser passed away before the project was complete, but his oral history will be one of the fourteen at Baltic, screened on locally donated, retro-style television sets.

The acclaimed artist Youssef Nabil photographed the remaining thirteen men. His images are sensitively hand-coloured using the old-fashioned technique popular in movie posters and family portraits in Cairo, Nabil's birthplace. The final visual arts installation will certainly provide a 'new way of seeing, hearing and understanding the complexity of Muslim identities.' As we part company, I suggest to gharavi that she would be an ideal guest on one of those Radio 4 discussion programmes; a compellingly calm voice with a new story in the heated multiculturalism debate. 'I could be on Woman's Hour,' she smiles. Seriously, someone should get on it...

Rebecca Hunter

Last of the Dictionary Men is at BALTIC, April 2 – May 5. The King Of South Shields will be screened in BALTIC’s cinema for the duration of the exhibition. www.balticmill.com

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