A Missing Can of Film [2025]

A co-commissioned work for EVA Ireland Biennial and the Kochi-Muziris Foundation, this film traces the lost left politics buried within an unfinished film by Zahir Raihan, who is posthumously known for his film Stop Genocide, edited in the style of Soviet Realism and Third Cinema during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Interrupting archival copies of Zahir Raihan’s films with contemporary footage shot at the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation in the aftermath of the Bangladesh Student Uprising of 2024, the film queries the carriers of disputed history – film canisters, dusty equipment, and a bustling film studio. 

Zahir Raihan disappeared at age 36 immediately after the Bangladesh liberation war. A bravura polymath, he had already directed ten films and written twelve novels. The tensions within his cinematic forms (from neorealist social realism to mass-popular entertainment), film dialogue (from Pakistan’s “Islamic language” of Urdu to the Bangladesh national language of Bengali), and political loyalties (from a nationalist project to the Soviet International) rendered him a cipher after death.  He was listed among war martyrs (shaheed), but he was abducted forty-five days after the end of the war. Rumors circulated that a missing can of 16mm film existed, which would have embarrassed the new country’s high command. There had already been friction about starting Stop Genocide with an image of Vladimir Lenin; Bangladesh had its own national leader and a growing aversion to the socialist stillborn.

KEY EXHIBITIONS

Limerick, Ireland
41st EVA International Biennial, 2025

Kochi, India
Kochi-Muziris Biennale Sixth Edition, 2025