A Thin Wall – UK screenings in August

Super excited that our film, A Thin Wall (which I co-produced with Surbhi Dewan), will be shown at the Museum At One Garden City in the UK. The screenings will be at 12pm, 3pm, and 6pm on Saturday August 26. These screenings are part of South Asian Heritage Month at the Museum. Pls attend if you are in the area.
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Repost from @reeln_uk:

ReelN presents South Asian Heritage Month at Museum At One Garden City, with an introductory exhibition featuring local South Asian stories and their contribution to the world’s first garden city!

This is an ongoing project and we want to hear from South Asian residents to record their stories of living and growing up in Letchworth Garden City.

The exhibition will be on display following a private launch event on Friday 21st July to August end and will be free to attend. Featuring stories about local football heroes, ‘Singh Sabha FC’, Dance celebrities ‘The Twilight Players’ and community members who have contributed to South Asian life and industry locally.

The exhibition closing event will also feature India, Pakistan documentary film, ‘A Thin Wall’ by filmmakers Mara Ahmed and Surbhi to be shown at 12pm, 3pm and 6pm on Saturday 26th August, also at the museum and free to attend.

There will be a full ‘Singh Sabha FC’ exhibition in collaboration with the museum in May 2024! -you heard it here first!

Join us to celebrate these local heroes!

Please direct any questions to hello@reeln.co.uk

my review: cold war

cold war is based on pawel pawlikowski’s own parents and their stormy relationship. in fact, the main characters have the same names as his mother and father.

the narrative of the film is polished, airtight, condensed — scenes are whittled down to their essence. for example, much of what happens to zula and wiktor when they’re apart remains off camera and is cut out of the film.

it is a fleeting, repeatedly interrupted romance that collides against broader political agitation. the lovers have to constantly move across borders, across the iron curtain itself, to be with each other. everything feels delicate and risky, close to imploding.
although the political conflicts that push the two lovers together and then apart, are squeezed out of the frame, their presence is felt strongly. there is constant dialogue between the story and the geopolitical changes that surround it.

music too enfolds them, brings them together, separates them, and evolves over time with them.

the film’s cinematography is stunning – a shimmering black and white, the contrast so rich that the black in the footage feels like velvet. the characters seem to push against this purity.

the boxy, 4:3 aspect ratio, might be a tribute to older films and a bygone historical era, but it also produces a sense of enclosure.

the love story at the center of the film is shaped by passion, insecurity and disappointment. when both characters meet in paris, one would have thought that all their problems would be solved. but i liked how we see a different side of immigration — the difficulty of leaving home and losing a part of oneself.

we witness a more nuanced difference between communism and individualism. in paris, wiktor has to master the art of commerce, selling and branding, whereas in communist poland, it’s more about ingratiating and appeasing people in power.
in spite of the film’s tight narrative control, it is open to interpretation. although it’s rooted in ideas about art, truth, love and politics, these themes are mostly suggested. they are not clarified or resolved. it’s almost like the film is some kind of gorgeously tragic metaphor.

my review: un coeur en hiver

how to describe ‘un coeur en hiver’? it’s an elegant film about a love triangle and although it is filled with wonderful music (ravel and debussy) it is not a spectacle of swelling passions. rather it takes its cue from western classical music, unfolding within a balanced composition, with organization and sangfroid. perhaps it emulates stephane, the enigmatic character at the heart of the film, played beautifully by daniel auteuil. an instrument maker who excels at delicate, complex work, he is reticent and ambivalent. perhaps this is what attracts camille, a gifted violinist who is dating stephane’s business partner maxime. not only do they both seem to express their emotions through their work, but she also desires his professional approval.

when camille gathers the courage to articulate her feelings, stephane rejects her. he tells her about his manipulative seduction which was meant to get back at maxime. stephane’s description of his relationship with maxime is surprising. it seems to be a substanceless, symbiotic partnership that he refuses to call friendship.

stephane’s words are hard to believe. perhaps he is also lying to himself. when he visits the apartment maxime and camille plan to share together, he is visibly shaken. therefore, a cold premeditated ploy seems unlikely.

there are many ways to understand stephane’s rebuff. did camille disturb the perfect synchronization between him and maxime? was stephane wary of disturbing the equilibrium in his own life, arranged meticulously like the furniture and tools in his workshop? or does he find it impossible to make a decision? his willpower at the end of the film, when he performs a difficult but compassionate act, seems to belie such passivity or indecision.

in some interviews, the director, claude sautet, has compared stephane to iago (the famous antagonist in shakespeare’s othello). but that comparison does not ring true. stephane is hardly a psychopath. just un coeur en hiver.

Return to Sender – Official Trailer

I am thrilled to share the trailer for Return to Sender: Women of Color in Colonial Postcards & the Politics of Representation. It’s a short film that explores Orientalist images of Indian women, circulated as postcards, during the British Raj. It opens up a conversation about objectification, beauty standards, identity, the colonial male gaze, and otherness. The film will premiere on Oct 1st at Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, NY, and will be followed by a community discussion. Thank you Dylan Toombs and Boris Sapozhnikov for this beautiful footage and Fatimah Arshad, Urvashi Bhattacharya and Sumayia Islam for your brilliant convo and performance in the film. We are almost done with color grading and graphics (thank you Rajesh Barnabas) and are getting ready for sound engineering. Thank you Patty Eljaiek, the Huntington Arts Council, Inc., Stephanie Godard, and the Huntington Historical Society for all your amazing support with this project!

This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrant Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by The Huntington Arts Council, Inc.

all human lives are not equal

fortress europe’s racism and contempt for human life shouldn’t shock us anymore. but it does. more than 700 people – including children – might have drowned in the mediterranean sea. many pakistanis were forced below deck. cannot imagine the horror and grief of their families. all this criminal neglect and inhumanity while rescuers ‘race against time’ and ‘massive search and rescue’ missions are underway to find 5 hyper rich people checking out the titanic’s wreckage. the contrast is obscene.

History is like an old house at night

He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside. “To understand history,” Chacko said, “we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.”

“But we can’t go in,” Chacko explained, “because we’ve been locked out. And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”

—Arundhati Roy in ‘The God of Small Things’

my review: taste of cherry

rewatched abbas kiarostami’s ‘taste of cherry’ after many years and enjoyed it much more this time. the premise of the film is a bit absurd and persnickety, but it should be understood as a folktale rather than a precise representation of reality. i was mesmerized by the conversations between mr badii (the main character) and the passengers in his car, who all react differently to mr badii’s appeal. each character is played to perfection: the nervous young soldier, the seminarist who relies on religious texts for steadiness, and finally the older taxidermist (the film’s most richly sketched character) who radiates compassion and uses his own life along with poetry, song and humor to change mr badii’s mind. he’s the only one who accepts mr badii’s unusual (ungodly?) request.

kiarostami chooses to focus on the periphery rather than on what is at the center. the soldier is a kurd and mr badii reminds him of kurdish strength and resilience in the face of persecution. the seminarist is an afghan refugee who talks about war and dislocation. finally, the taxidermist is an azarbaijani turk. all minorities. all on the margins, not at the center of society. a subtle way to provide political context and address issues that would otherwise be censored.

the film is shot in the outskirts of tehran where there is new construction. we are constantly immersed (buried?) in the dust and noise produced by bulldozers and dump trucks. we are on the outside (where everything shifts and is unsettled), not in the innermost sanctum of the city.

kiarostami’s enthusiasm for cars is on display, much like in ‘ten,’ ‘certified copy’ and the ‘kokar trilogy.’ there is something intimate about placing the camera inside a car.

the end of the film is genius. it reminded me of cezanne — his use of thick brushstrokes and flat shapes, his reinvention of perspective, the unpainted corners and pencil outlines in his work, all make the tools of his trade visible. similarly, kiarostami reveals himself, his film crew, and the cameras, shotgun mics, boom poles, and megaphones which make filmmaking possible. it allows us to take a step back and hope for a more cheerful ending to ‘taste of cherry.’

A Thin Wall in Winnipeg

More wonderful news! A Thin Wall, my film about the partition of India co-produced by Surbhi Dewan and myself, will be screened this Saturday in Winnipeg, Canada:
The Kohinoor Collective presents Winnipeg’s first Punjabi Film Festival, featuring films about Punjabi histories, politics, and diasporas. Funding for the Punjabi Film Festival is provided by the Manitoba Arts Council and University of Manitoba Community Engagement/Prairie Asian Organizers.
A Thin Wall will be screened on Sat Jun 17 2023 at 05:15 pm and will be followed by a discussion. You can buy tickets online and then head to the Dave Barber Cinematheque in Winnipeg.