Molla Sagar
Molla Sagar (born 1975) is a prominent Bangladeshi filmmaker, cinematographer, and artist known for exploring rural life, social justice, and cultural practices. His films are made with a deep respect and empathy for the people he depicts, never allowing them to be depicted in a state of pity. He aims instead to show their resilience in the face of impossible challenges—from the salination of farmland and the consequences of open cast coal mining, to the fight for survival of people living on the bleeding edge of the climate emergency.
Based in Bagerhat, he trained in graphic design at Dhaka University. His films, often focusing on marginalised communities, include O Pakhi (2002), Dudh-Koyla (2006), and The Ilish.
The quiet radiance of everyday acts emerges between a beautiful portrait of a Bangladeshi centenarian and a tender chronicle of a woman choosing a dignified death. This Focus programme touches on themes of ageing, autonomy, and what it means to inhabit—and ultimately release—the body.
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Spanning Partition to contemporary Bangladesh, this programme journeys through fractured homes and unfinished films to ask how history lingers in bodies, cities, and celluloid. Between memory and the archives, the works trace disappearance, displacement, and the stubborn afterlives of images in the face of erasure.
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Intimate portraits of everyday life and struggle in Bangladesh speak together with playful, inter-textual vignettes exploring the confluence of autobiography and radical history. Together, Naeem Mohaiemen and Molla Sagar‘s films trace how personal memory and political upheaval collide, overlap, and refract across generations.