Letters from Panduranga + Sahnehaye Estekhraj (Scenes of Extraction)

‘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.

Letters from Panduranga

Nguyen Trinh Thi

2015 

35’

Vietnamese with English subtitles

Letters from Panduranga was developed in response to the Vietnamese government’s plan to build the country’s first nuclear power plants in Ninh Thuân. This is a province once known as Panduranga and a spiritual centre for the ancient matriarchal Cham culture, now an ethnic minority in the country. The Cham indigenous culture originated almost two thousand years ago, and Panduranga was the last of the Champa territories to be annexed in 1832 by the kingdom of Dai Viêt, present-day Vietnam. Nguyễn’s film thinks through the marginalisation and erasure of indigenous history and experience, alongside media censorship of ecological destruction and injustice. Responding to this censorship in the form of letters, she situates the film between the macro of these power structures and the micro ecologies of specific places, details and personal stories.

Sahnehaye Estekhraj (Scenes of Extraction) 

Sanaz Sohrabi 

2023

43’

Farsi, English with English subtitles

Sahnehaye Estekhraj (Scenes of Extraction) creates an archival constellation from the still and moving images of British Petroleum Archives, documenting the expansive colonial network behind the British geophysical expeditions that spanned across Iran. The film focuses on the parallel production of geological and ethnographic surveys, both through amateur geological footage and official technical film surveys produced by BP. It weaves through decades of archival documents to parse out the visual history of the “reflection seismography” method for oil exploration which was heavily tested across the Iranian oil belt despite its destructive and speculative nature. Situated at the nexus between science and technology studies and media archaeology, the film traces the technical legacy of these geophysical methods that are still used in deep-sea mining and are the backbone of the global energy complex. By blending the archival and speculative modes of representing the geological past, Sahnehaye Estekhraj reveals the gaps and discrepancies between the archival and lived histories of extraction and the ecological ruination of its aftermath.

Schedule

19:00 - doors

19:30 - Letters from Panduranga

20:05 - Sahnehaye Estekhraj (Scenes of Extraction)

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 up of a man's face wearing a white protective mask

Image 2 description: high technicolour composite image; in the background there is a man receiving an eye test, the overlaid image is two men exploding a bomb in a desert.

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Supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland and Glasgow International Festival.

Event Venue

GAMIS Cinema, Niddrie Road, Glasgow, United Kingdom