About this Event
‘The Ground Is Not Unchanging’ is a curated series of screenings and workshops bookending Mina Heydari-Waite’s solo exhibition for Glasgow International Festival 2024. Throughout May, Heydari-Waite has programmed a season of screenings of works that resonate with her current research into alternative archival practices seeking pluralised and liberatory understandings of the world we share. We can not think about liberation without thinking about Palestine. We stand in solidarity with a free Palestine and anti-colonial struggles across the globe.
Dear F
Hannan Jones
2023
7’
English with English closed captions
Dear F... is a hybrid documentary that navigates the intricate dynamics between personal and collective histories. Intertwining stories of Algerian migrants and their diaspora. Born in the early 90s, the filmmaker discovers a cache of letters from that turbulent time, shedding light on the challenges faced by Algerians. The work blends the past and the present day through conversation with local barber Walid, whose shop is adorned with Algerian identity. The barbershop itself a symbol of transformation, knowledge and community, navigates how migrant identities connect with ideas of home. Dear F... nurtures connections through letters and conversations, always circling back to the starting point.
Letter From Your Far-Off Country
Suneil Sanzgiri
2020
18’
English, Urdu, Hindi with English subtitles
Shot with 16mm film stock that expired in 2002—the same year as the state-sponsored anti-Muslim genocide in Gujarat—and filmed amid the anti-CAA protests in Delhi, the filmmaker traces lines and lineages of ancestral memory, poetry, history, songs, and ruins from his birth in 1989. A search for solidarity in the sounds and colours of the spontaneous Muslim women-led Shaheen Bagh movement in Delhi, in the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, the song of Iqbal Bano, the theatre of Safdar Hashmi, and images of B. R. Ambedkar—the radical anti-caste Dalit intellectual and founder of the Indian constitution—all surrounding a letter addressed to the filmmaker’s distant relative Prabhakar Sanzgiri, who wrote biographies of Ambedkar and was a Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader in Maharashtra.
Letter From Your Far-off Country is the second film in a series of new works addressing ancestral memory, diaspora, history, decoloniality, and cross-continental solidarity. These themes, which run recurrent, think through a series of questions, reflections, and intimations of how we live through moments of trauma, violence, and revolt.
the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered
Onyeka Igwe
2019
25’
English with English closed captions
This is a story of the artist’s grandfather, the story of the ‘land’ and the story of an encounter with Nigeria—retold at a single point in time, in a single place. The artist is trying to tell a truth in as many ways as possible. So ‘the names have changed…’ tells us the same story in four different ways: a folktale of two brothers rendered in the broad, unmodulated strokes of colonial British moving images; a Nollywood TV series, on VHS, based on the first published Igbo novel; oral histories of the family patriarch, passed down through generations; and the diary entries from the artist’s first solo visit to her family’s hometown. Igwe pushes against the materials of the archive—its distortions, fabrications and embellishments—with her own kind of autofictional response. ‘the names have changed…’ throws the ordinary and the everyday within the archive into relief by daring to write and re-write the stories of diasporic African life against the grain of colonial history's master narratives. (Tendai John Mutambu)
Schedule
19:00 - doors
19:30 - Dear F…
19:40 - Letter from your far off country
20:00 - the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered
20:30 - Hannan Jones and Mina Heydari-Waite in conversation
21:00 - event ends
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OFFLINE, formerly (Glasgow Artists’ Moving Image Studios) is a charitable organisation committed to supporting experimental arts and community-focused film programming in Govanhill.
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Pay what you can: £0-£12
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All titles will be shown with closed captions.
The OFFLINE Cinema has step free access but toilets are not accessible. We apologise for this and assure you that we are working on making the building a more welcoming space. In the meantime, The Bungo on Nithsdale Rd have granted our audience access to their accessible toilets.
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Certification:
Both films have no certification
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Image 1 description: close shot of hair clippers under neon lights on grainy film.
Image 2 description: a dapper looking man sits under a tree.
Image 3 description: the artist Onyeka Igwe holds up their hands to the camera.
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Supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland and Glasgow International Festival.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
GAMIS Cinema, Niddrie Road, Glasgow, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00 to GBP 12.00
