About this Event
MICHAEL: NOW AND THEN - Nearly 50 years after his breakout thesis short film MICHAEL, a 16mm docudrama shot in South Wales about a young man (Michael) and his miner father, director Ramin Niami returns to discover what has happened to the community since, particularly following the closure of the coal mines. The film integrates scenes from the original short film MICHAEL alongside archival imagery and new digital material. (57m, 2026, U.K., Director: Ramin Niami) + Director Q&A
THE CONSCRIPT traces the remnants of a 176 year history of mining in Zonguldak, Türkiye’s first coal basin. Amid compulsory labour laws, abandoned workers’ towns and rusting industrial structures, the film examines how coal has shaped a city’s geography, memory and people.
Opening with the defeats suffered by the working-class and environmental struggles across different parts of Türkiye, the narrative gradually turns towards the everyday lives of the bodies working in the darkness underground. The camera follows the miners’ warmth, humour, anxieties and exhaustion. In Zonguldak, every shift carries not only the fatigue of labour and the uncertainty of emerging alive from the mine, but also the weight of a mining fate passed down from father to son.
Moving from the powerful trade union movements of the past to the fragmented and increasingly isolated working class of the present, the film approaches Zonguldak not only as a geography of labour, but also as the miners’ memory, home and unconscious. Mining towns are built, used and often abandoned; what remains is not only ruins, but also the possibility of a future that never came to be: the ghost of a happy workers’ town.
But dreams collapse, and dreams are rebuilt. The force that produces life lies within the bodies breaking rock in the dark. (1 hr 6m, 2026, Turkey, Director: Arda Sarıgün)
Event venue & nearby stays
Cinema Village, 22 East 12th St, New York, United States
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