For the Love of Paper

For the Love of Paper is a play about immigration, friendship and the things we'll do for the people we love. It is the rarely told story of unsuccessful migration — the side of the migrant story that doesn't end with citizenship, family photos, and a quiet exhale at the airport.

Amaliah is facing deportation. She is also, inconveniently, a believer in true love — which makes the obvious solution, a marriage of convenience, anything but obvious. Her best friend Kaveh is a different kind of believer: in friendship, in finding a way through, in not letting the system win. Together, they navigate a maze of paperwork, principle and consequence — where the line between a happy future and a criminal one is, at moments, thinner than the page their lives are written on.

The work is honest about the absurdity and the cost of immigration systems, and equally honest about the love — romantic, platonic, familial — that holds people together while they wait. It is a piece that earns its laughs and its tears in roughly equal measure.

Performed at KXT on Broadway, 5–20 April 2024. Written and co-produced by Almitra Mavalvala. Directed and co-produced by Kersherka. Documented in partnership with Macquarie University Film School.