Naeem Mohaiemen is a writer and filmmaker based in Dhaka, Bangladesh and New York, USA. He combines essays, films, drawings, and installations to research left insurgencies and incomplete decolonizations– framed by Third World Internationalism and World Socialism. Despite underscoring a left tendency toward misrecognition, a hope for a future international left, against current silos of race and religion, is a basis for the work.
Mohaiemen is the recipient of the 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship and was nominated for the 2018 Turner Prize, where his films Tripoli Cancelled(2017), a three channel film designed to be in a documentary form, and Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), a fictional film focusing on the key moment in Bangladesh’s ideological shift from socialism to Islamism.
Shown above, the trailer for “Tripoli Cancelled”, Naeem Mohaiemen, 2017.
Shown above, an excerpt from a showing of “Two Meetings and a Funeral”, Naeem Mohaiemen, 2017.
Currently, Mohaiemen is working on “A Missing Can of Film”, a film surrounding a 16 mm film, hidden inside a can of cooking flour and abandoned by a communist filmmaker. His work over the last decade has included a search for mirages such as this missing film canister. At the inflection point of digital dystopia, we still attach hope onto the analog. The revealed futility of these quests leads to new stories to take away the bitter.
A Missing Can of Film is included in the ACT’s Fall 2019 Lecture Series: The Inexplicable Wonder of Precipitous Events, with a lecture by Mohaiemen on Monday, December 2nd, 2019.
