This video is a poetic crossing of time, body, and memory.

20 years of belly dance.
20 years since Latifah was born.

This video is a poetic crossing of time, body, and memory.

My story with art did not begin on a stage.
It began in the sacred — in silence, discipline, devotion, and restraint.
It began in faith, before it became a movement.

I was born in the sertão nordestino, in the Caatinga of Northeast Brazil — a land of drought and resistance, austerity and invention. A place where the body learns early how to endure, how to wait, how to transform scarcity into presence. I carry this land with pride. It shaped my rhythm long before I knew it would become dance.

Belly dance arrived later, not as an ornament, but as a return.
A return to the body.
A return to breath.
A return to myself.

Latifah was born there — in the tension between the sacred and the sensual, between discipline and surrender, between what was allowed and what insisted on existing anyway.

This video is not a chronology.
It is a remembrance.
Fragments of faith, land, exile, art, rupture, and persistence — woven through movement.

Twenty years later, I do not celebrate mastery.
I celebrate survival, transformation, and continuity.

This is not just about dance.
It is about what the body keeps when words fail.
About what returns, even after silence.

Latifah is not a character.
She is a memory that learned how to move.

If you want, I can:

Make a shorter Instagram / YouTube version

Add a more political/feminist ending

Or create a second description focused on the sertão and Caatinga imagery

Just tell me the tone you want to sharpen next.

By Raizartes Produções