THE FUTURE THAT AWAITS
Curated by Lila Nazemian, ArteEast Special Projects Curator
THE FUTURE THAT AWAITS presents films about Afghan children and youth made in the years following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan and until the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in Summer 2021. Sharing experiences throughout Afghanistan as well as in Iran, the films explore how characters navigate inherited political realities, legacies of social traditions, access to education, isolated communities, and child labor. The in-person screening features five short films that reflect the main themes of the program.
Featuring works by Lida Abdul, Yalda Afsah, Aidin Halalzadeh, Sahra Mani, Shahrbanoo Sadat, Sepideh Salarvand, and Ginan Seidl.
THE FUTURE THAT AWAITS is co-presented by ArteEast and The Clemente and is curated by Lila Nazemian, ArteEast Special Projects Curator. This screening is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents nearly 20 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. This program will be screened online on artearchive.org from February 18-26, 2023. A selection of films from the program will be screened in-person at The Clemente on February 17th at 7PM EST, followed by a post-screening discussion. For more information, visit theclementecenter.org
In-person screening:
Friday, February 17th
The Clemente’s Flamboyan Theater
Address: 107 Suffolk St, New York, NY 10002
7 PM - 10 PM EST
Tickets: $10
Screening followed by a Q&A
FILM PROGRAM
White House, Lida Abdul, Afghanistan, 2005, 5 mins
Dari with English subtitles
Synopsis: White House represents a government building that was knocked down by a US air strike. Only a few columns (it was a neoclassical style construction) and a few walls of the building stand in their original vertical condition, all the rest has been reduced to rubble. Lida Abdul started painting everything in white, from the small stones to the entire column. White is the color of mourning in Islamic culture, and the color of peace for Catholics (the white dove). White is the color that is used to erase something wrong or something that has to be hidden. White is the color of the American presidential residence, the White House, in Washington
D.C., also a neoclassical building. Lida Abdul reflects on the representation of ruin or the subsequent significance and fate of sites of catastrophe, death and memorial. In White House, the depiction of herself is not an attempt to reclaim the heroic position, but a more disturbing image of both the futility of violence and the double displacement of women in war.
Brick Sellers of Kabul, Lida Abdul, Afghanistan, 2006, 6 mins
Dari with English subtitles
Synopsis: To express the constant feeling of precariousness in the lives of the inhabitants of Afghanistan, Lida Abdul uses local people as actors in her native land to shoot her works. In Brick sellers of Kabul what most strikes the viewer is the confidence in the way Lida Abdul depicts a surreal situation: A row of kids queues to sell bricks that they collected from a collapsed structure to a man who stacks the bricks up into a cubic sculpture, perhaps in an effort to erect the very same structure the bricks originally came from. The action of tossing the bricks occurs during a sandstorm, a scene both full of harmony and madness at the same time. The power of these pictures comes from the will Lida Abdul has to evoke, rather than to report directly, the devastation of a land. She evokes this destruction through tiny gestures that become rituals, delicate sounds produced by the wind that become a chant, a prayer, and a dialogue that, as sudden as lightning, carry us back to the cruel reality of need.
Vice Versa One, Shahrbanoo Sadat, Afghanistan, 2011, 10 mins
Dari with English and French subtitles
Synopsis: Somewhere in Afghanistan, a little girl goes place to place to collect people's votes.
Kaloo School, Sahra Mani, Afghanistan, 2012, 16 mins
Dari with English subtitles
Synopsis: In between the famous Baba Mountain in rural Center of Afghanistan there is a village with 2500 families with just two schools for children. Nine-year-old Fakhereh from Afghanistan isn’t content to be a goatherd. She goes to school and enjoys learning. However, she has to walk there on foot and the journey takes two-and-a-half hours. There are only two schools available to children in this mountainous area – one for boys and one for girls. Most of the girls only complete primary school and then remain at home. Only 5% of women in Afghanistan are educated; the rest are illiterate. Therefore, Fakhereh’s fate is uncertain. The little girl has to take the goats to pasture every morning and bring her father lunch. Will she manage to change things? Does she have any chance of following her dream?
Bacha Posh, Yalda Afsah and Ginan Seidl, Germany, 2016, 30 mins
Dari with English subtitles
Synopsis: The two-channel installation Bacha Posh is a multifaceted documentary focusing on the Afghan tradition of dressing girls as boys in order for them to be able to fulfill the function of a male family member. Framed by atmospheric shots of urban landscapes in Mazar-e-Sharif, Bacha Posh follows the life of 13-year-old Farahnaz, adding unexpected perspectives to the discourse around the social construction of gender. Presented on two screens, the work contrasts the private and the public, interior and exterior spheres.
The Lowland, Aidin Halalzadeh and Sepideh Salarvand, Iran, 2021, 52 mins
Persian with English subtitles
Synopsis: Lowland is an intimate portrait of a community of undocumented migrant Afghan children, living and working as garbage collectors in the margins of Tehran. Over the course of five years, the two filmmakers, Sepideh and Aidin, documented their encounters with the children first as ethnographers and volunteer teachers, and later as filmmakers. The film is an assemblage of personal everyday stories and gestures shared by the children of the Lowland as powerful individuals rather than mere child workers.
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FILMMAKER BIOS
Lida Abdul (Kabul, 1973). Lives and works in Los Angeles and Kabul. The first artist of her country to represent Afghanistan at the 51st edition of the Venice Biennale in 2005, she was then selected to participate in numerous other Biennales and Triennales: São Paulo Biennial 2006; Gwangju Biennial 2006; Moscow Biennial 2007; Sharjah Biennial 2007; Göteborg Biennial 2007; Venice Biennale 2015; Busan Biennale 2016; Istanbul Biennial 2022. Her work has also been presented at: Istanbul Modern, Istanbul; Kunsthalle, Vienna; Museum of Modern Art, Arnhem; Miami Central, Miami; ICA Toronto, Toronto; ZKM Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe; Capc, Bordeaux; CAC, Brétigny; Frac Lorraine, Metz; Musée Chagall, Nice; National Museum, Kabul; Tate Modern, London; MOMA, New York; Location One, New York; OK Centrum for Contemporary Art, Linz; Western Front Exhibitions and Centre A, Vancouver; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis; Royal Academy of Arts, London; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Zentrum Paul Klee, Berne; Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem; Louis Vuitton Espace, Paris; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon; CAC, Málaga; Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris; MART, Rovereto; Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; Fondazione Merz, Torino; CAP, Lyon; Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. She has won the Taiwan Award (2005), the Premio Pino Pascali (2005), the Prince Claus Award (2006), as well as the UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts (2007). She was a finalist of the First Edition of the Mario Merz Prize (2015). Her work appears in numerous public and private collections, including the Frac Lorraine, Metz; GAM - Torino, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; the MOMA, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Sharjah Art Foundation,
Sharjah.
Yalda Afsah (b. 1983, Berlin) is a German-Iranian artist and filmmaker who explores how space can be cinematically constructed as her films profoundly explore the interface between reality and staging. This formal characteristic of Afsah’s work is conceptually mirrored in her recent portraits of human-animal relationships that reveal an ambivalence between care and control, physical strength and broken will, instinct and manipulation. Despite their documentary focus, her films and video installations seem to capture symbiotic choreographies on screen – equally portraying and fictionalising their human and non-human protagonists. Afsah has presented her work at various exhibitions and festivals including Manifesta 13, Locarno Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Berlinische Galerie, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and recent solo exhibitions at Kunstverein München and Halle für Kunst Steiermark. Since 2019 she is a mentor for the Berlin program for artists (BPA).
Sahra Mani is a multiple award-winning filmmaker. She received her master’s degree in documentary filmmaking from the University of Arts London with high distinction and her BA in Film and Cinema. Sahra’s works as a producer and director have had huge impact on women rights, equality and justice.
As a lecturer at Kabul University, she organized several film festivals and offered training and mentoring in Afghanistan. Mani’s films have screened at film festivals around the world and aired on broadcast networks globally. Her work as an Impact Campaign producer raises awareness and promotes action for issues and causes that demand social changes.
Sahra was a jury member for several film festivals and competitions like World Food Forum FF 2021, International Photo Competition on Global Health and Gender at UCL London 2020, and Rumi FF in Sweden 2018.
Her full-length documentary film, A THOUSAND GIRLS LIKE ME, was screened at many film festivals like HotDocs, Sheffield, and IDFA and won more than 25 awards worldwide, including three GOLD Awards at New York Festivals TV & Film, One World Media Award 2019, Full Frame Film Festival, and San Francisco Film Festival.
Shahrbanoo Sadat (b. 1991), is an Afghan script writer and director based in Hamburg, Germany since Kabul’s fall in August 2021. Her debut film WOLF AND SHEEP won the top award at Directors’ Fortnight-Cannes Film festival 2016. The film was developed with the Cannes Cinéfondation Residency in 2010, Shahrbanoo was 20 years old at the time – the youngest ever selected for the residence. She premiered her second feature THE ORPHANAGE at the same section at Cannes Film Festival in 2019. Shahr studied documentary filmmaking at the Kabul workshop of “Atelier Varan” in 2009. Her first short fiction “Vice Versa One'' was selected at Directors’ Fortnight-2011. Both WOLF AND SHEEP and THE ORPHANAGE are part of her pentalogy project (5 feature films) based on Anwar’s Hashimi autobiographical text of 800 pages. At the moment, Shahrbanoo is developing the third part, KABUL JAN, a romantic comedy.
Aidin Halalzadeh (b. 1989) lives and works as an editor and color correction assistant in a film studio in Tehran.
Sepideh Salarvand (b. 1991) lives and works in Tehran, Iran. She received her BA in Social Sciences from Tehran University. Her book, "I Could Not Speak," published in 2022, is a collection of essays based on her Master’s Thesis “An ethnography of Afghan child laborers in Tehran."
Ginan Seidl is a German-Iraqi artist and filmmaker who explores the boundaries between documentary and fictional filmmaking and video installations, where the fabulative becomes a poetic and essential extension of the documentary material. She explores different perspectives and cosmogonies in order to relate, learn and find new forms of exchange and production of knowledge and experience through cinematic means. The focus is on the complex relationships with the self, the "other" and non-human actors in different local contexts. Many of her past as well as present projects have been (further) developed in residencies in Istanbul, Mexico and Beirut, among others. Her work has been shown at international festivals such as Berlinale/Forum Expanded, FID Marseille, CPH:DOX, Dokfilmfest Leipzig, EMAF and in various exhibitions and art festivals. She is part of the artist collective FILZ. She lives and works in Halle/Saale, Berlin and Mexico City.