Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

As history is mythologized to reinforce national imaginaries, what becomes the role of memory, of lived and imagined experience, in transforming and disrupting master narratives?

UnionDocs is delighted to present GEOGRAPHIES OF BELONGING, a series of film screenings and conversations curated with Senjuti Mukherjee, PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh. In MEMORIES OF A GLOBAL LEFT, the second program in this series, we’re delighted to welcome scholar-filmmaker Naeem Mohaiemen to screen and discuss Afsan’s Long Day (The Young Man Was, Part II).

Posturing as exceptions, scandalous emergencies light up our phone screens, when in fact the twenty-first century has been marked by a world caught in a permanent state of crisis. The last few decades have witnessed mass protests against global democratic erosion, generating a constant flow of amateur videos, photographs and sounds produced by citizens living in multi-screen ecosystems. As fatigue and forgetting are mobilized for diplomatic strategy, we turn to sites of counter-memory and forgotten histories to unsettle mainstream narratives of history, social memory and community.

Afsan’s Long Day (The Young Man Was, Part II), is one of four parts of Mohaiemen’s The Young Man Was project, which reflects on the failures of radical, armed leftist movements of the 1970s. The film is inspired by Bangladeshi historian Afsan Chowdhury’s diary entries, which contained the phrase alluded to in the film’s title: “the young man was… no longer a terrorist.” Weaving together Afsan’s diaristic accounts with photographs, footage, and voice-over, Mohaiemen evokes forgotten histories of the transnational circulation of Left ideologies in the 1970s and examines their eventual failure.

We’re looking forward to a conversation with Naeem Mohaiemen following the screening and hope to see you there!

Special thanks to the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for coming on board as contributing partners for this series!

Program

Afsan’s Long Day (The Young Man Was, Part II)

40 mins, 2014

Afsan’s Long Day is the second work in The Young Man Was series (made between 2011 and 2017), the entirety of which probes the lives of the “flailing and failing masculinity project” that blindsided the chief actors in revolutionary struggles in the 1970s. These figures are, according to a prevailing western-centric history, supporting actors: in Afsan’s Long Day, the two predominant figures are Afsan Chowdhury, a “freelance Marxist” (by his own sardonic description) Bangladeshi historian active in the 1970s; and Joschka Fischer, the German former left-wing militant who ‘defected to electoral politics’ in 1983. Through a montage of wide-ranging archival footage, voiceover and still photography, Mohaiemen’s subjects raise questions of the failures of revolutionary politics in the 1970s. By examining the ways in which “blindspot machismo” played into the failures of the left in this period, Afsan’s Long Day draws attention to still-pervasive gender constructions that continue to shape political power globally.

Program Duration: 40 mins

Bios

Naeem Mohaiemen makes films about lonely families, unstable borders, empty architecture, and revolutionary uprisings in the decolonizing Muslim world after 1945. Conversations in contemporary museums around “nonalignment” as a concept container were inspired by the premiere of Mohaiemen’s film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017) at documenta 14, which was a finalist for Britain’s Turner Prize. Art critic Murtaza Vali points to Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man (1976) as “a hapless history student studying for a Ph.D., an erstwhile stand-in for Mohaiemen.”

Art Review magazine’s annual “Power 100,” a list of 100 most influential art practitioners, included him at #81 in the 2023 rankings.

Senjuti Mukherjee is a PhD student of Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh working on new media environments, dissident citizenship, video activism and the transforming art and politics of twenty-first-century documentary. She did a Master’s in Art History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and a Bachelor’s in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She has worked as an archivist, editor and curator in India for over a decade. During this time, she led archival projects in film publicity memorabilia, film and photography at Osian’s, Eka and Delhi Art Gallery. In recent years, she has commissioned and edited publications, including long-form research on visual and performance arts for the Serendipity Arts Foundation and multi-media research on South Asian film, video and photography for Alternative South Asia Photography.