A Relaxed Screening of this programme will take place simultaneously at Berwick Town Hall Council Chamber.
Naeem Mohaiemen and Molla Sagar are BFMAF26 Filmmakers in Focus, with post-screening conversations faciltated by Dr Sanghita Sen, Assistant Professor in Film, Department of Arts, Northumbria University, Newcastle.
Sanghita Sen is a film and cultural studies scholar and a documentary filmmaker with a background in English & comparative literature, and Linguistics. She completed her second PhD in Film Studies—centred on the Bengali cinema of the 1970s—at the University of St. Andrews before joining the University of Northumbria in 2023. Field work undertooken for the thesis paved the way for a feature length documentary on Ritwik Ghatak, the Bengal Partition, and refugee crisis. Whilst subsequent research interests have widened to include tricontinental political cinema and its facilitation of cultural encounters between filmmakers from the Global South.
The programme is supported by Midnight’s Third Child through the British Council’s Connections Through Culture Programme.
Bhobar Vita
Born as twins in the heart of Dhaka in 1925, two lives are slowly unstitched by he Partition of 1947 that carves a border across Bengal. Across multiple perspectives, Bhobar Vita drifts through the fractured geographies of the old city, tracing how displacement seeps into art, the persistence of memory, and how home endures as both wound and inheritance.
A Missing Can of Film
Mohaiemen traces the rumour of an unfinished film concealed in a can of flour, circling the memory of Zahir Raihan – a communist filmmaker and public intellectual who disappeared in the aftermath of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Intercutting fragments of Raihan’s work with footage shot at the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation after the 2024 Student Uprising, he probes the political architecture of the archive, where analog ghosts persist, flickering at the inflection point of digital amnesia.