Part 1 of a BFMAF screening and conversation series between filmmakers Naeem Mohaiemen and Molla Sagar, facilitated by Dr Sanghita Sen, Assistant Professor in Film, Department of Arts, Northumbria University, Newcastle.
Films discussed include:
Siren
- Director: Molla Sagar
- Country: Bangladesh
- Year: 2012
Once hailed as “golden fibre,” jute bound field to factory, sustaining millions across Bengal. This film bears witness to its slow unravelling – from colonial boom to post-independence nationalisation, and the brutal retrenchments of the 1980s that shuttered mills and cast workers adrift. In the shadow of the closures at Khalishpur in Khulna, Siren listens to the aftershocks: hunger, dispossession, and the quiet terror of futures collapsing into silence.
Abu Ammar is Coming
- Director :Naeem Mohaiemen
- Countries: Bangladesh, Lebanon, United Kingdom
A photograph taken by a Magnum photographer in 1982 lingers like a provocation: five men in fatigues inside a bombed-out room – four gaze outward, one meets the camera. The elusive image was said to show Bangladeshi fighters aligned with the PLO’s Fatah faction. Abu Ammar Is Coming revisits the revolutionary 1970s through the figure of Abu Ammar (the nom de guerre of Yasser Arafat), tracing how internationalist dreams flickered against the gathering dark.
Ganga Buri
- Director: Molla Sagar
- Country: Bangladesh
- Year: 2009
A lyrical poem about the forever flow of the Ganges river, Ganga Buri can be seen as a love letter to its position in people’s hearts. Focusing on the ancient ritual of ‘Ganga Puja’, where people come to be spiritually cleansed by the water, Sagar imagines the hopes of this mother river – that she would want to purify her children as they speak to her.
Rankin Street, 1953
- Director: Naeem Mohaiemen
- Country: Bangladesh
- Year: 2024
In a small box salvaged from his old family home in Dhaka, Mohaiemen discovered over a hundred negatives, wrapped in wax paper and carefully labeled in his father’s handwriting. The intimate archive showed no rallies, no flags, only the quiet theatre of domestic life in newly formed East Pakistan – and lots of cats. In Rankin Street, 1953 / 2013, he scans, redraws, and narrates these fragments, asking how private tenderness shadows the larger, vanishing histories of a nation.
Doodh Koila
- Director: Molla Sagar
- Country: Bangladesh
- Year: 2006
In Bucchigram, under Phulbari in Dinajpur, Santal farmers speak of the land as blood-bound – they will not leave it. Shot during the 2006–07 Phulbari coal movement, the film documents their resistance to open-cast mining and the threat to their agrarian way of life. Children sing “Amar Sonar Bangla” (My Golden Bengal, I love you) in school, even as the soil beneath them is marked for extraction. In Bangladesh, belonging becomes both anthem and barricade.
Wooster Street
- Director: Naeem Mohaiemen
- Country: United States
- Year: 2024
Wooster Street unfolds as an afternoon conversation between Naeem Mohaiemen and Judith Blum inside the storied Fluxus Building – a fading remnant of SoHo’s artist-run utopia shaped by George Maciunas. Weaving Blum’s voice with home movies and echoes of Jonas Mekas, the film becomes a lockdown elegy for a vanished community, where art once remade life – and now survives as memory.
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