Doc Talk: “Afsan’s Long Day” with Naeem Mohaiemen, 10/26
Monday, Oct. 26, 2PM EST
ONLINE DOC TALK (Registration required)
FREE AND OPEN TO THE NEW SCHOOL STUDENTS, FACULTY and STAFF
AFSAN’S LONG DAY
Screening and Q&A with filmmaker and artist Naeem Mohaiemen
Register HERE
AFSAN’S LONG DAY (41 min.)
A complex portrait of Bangladeshi historian and liberation war researcher Afsan Chowdhury, who writes diary entries in the form of magazine editorials. Using a third-person voice as a distancing device, and through stories of being a long-term diabetic, his time in exile (or immigration) in Toronto, and his navigation of the debris of a nation trapped by the past, Chowdhury revisits his radical past and returns to the long day when he almost died. The men in uniform wanted to execute him after they found the Marxist pantheon in his library. “They thought I wrote them after I said so; I probably fit into the visual imagination of a radical. Beards are never trusted on young men. I argued with them about searching our house.” What else do you need to identify an enemy?
Naeem Mohaiemen researches rhizomatic families, malleable borders, and socialist utopias. The idea of a future global left, as an alternative to current organizing categories of race, religion, and nation, drives the work. He is author of Midnight’s Third Child (Nokta, forthcoming) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Kunsthalle Basel, 2014); and co-editor w/ Eszter Szakacs of Solidarity Must be Defended (Tranzit, forthcoming) and w/ Lorenzo Fusi of System Error: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (Sylvana, 2007). He is on the board of the Vera List Center for Art & Politics, New School, New York, and the film council of ICA, London. [shobak.org]
Please join us for this online screening and Q&A, hosted and moderated by Amir Husak, Director of Documentary Studies and Assistant Professor in the School of Media Studies.