Naeem Mohaiemen | Celluloid Frontiers: A Missing Can of Film and Stop Genocide

In conjunction with the exhibition Private Frontiers, BAMPFA presents A Missing Can of Film (2025), a 44-minute essay film by artist and filmmaker Naeem Mohaiemen. Commissioned by the EVA International and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the project explores the legacy of slain Bangladeshi filmmaker Zahir Raihan and the unresolved complexities of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War The screening will include a conversation between Naeem Mohaiemen and Tausif Noor, Assistant Curator at BAMPFA. Opening remarks by Elora Shehabuddin, Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Global Studies and Director, Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies, UC Berkeley. Co-sponsored by the Institute for South Asia Studies, The Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies, and the South Asia Art Initiative at UC Berkeley. — DATE: Thu, Oct 29, 2026 TIME: 7-8 pm PST VENUE: BAMPFA TICKETS: Tickets for BAMPFA members are now on sale.Tickets for the general public go on sale Friday, August 7 at 11 AM. Buy tickets HERE — About the Film Commissioned by EVA Ireland International and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, A Missing Can of Film (2025) traces the lost-left politics buried within Zahir Raihan’s Stop Genocide (1971)—a film edited in the style of Soviet Realism and Third Cinema during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Raihan, a novelist and director, was abducted only forty-five days after the end of the war. A Missing Can of Film combines scenes from Stop Genocide with footage shot at the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation after the nation’s 2024 July Student “Monsoon” Uprising, interrogating the film canister as a vessel of contested history. About the Artist/Filmmaker Naeem Mohaiemen imagines rhizomatic families, malleable borders, and socialist utopias– beginning from postcolonial markers and then radiating outward to unlikely transnational alliances. In spite of underscoring a tendency toward misrecognition of allies, the hope of a future global left, against current categories of race, religion and nation, drives the work. He is author of Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Kunsthalle Basel, 2014); editor of Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism (Drishtipat, 2010); and co-editor w/ Lorenzo Fusi of System Error: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (Sylvana, 2007). About the Discussant Tausif Noor is Assistant Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where he helped organize the exhibition To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)Permanent Collection. He previously worked as the Spiegel-Wilks Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Noor’s writing, for which he has received awards from the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, has been published in various periodicals and journals, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Art History, and Artforum, as well as in various artist catalogues and edited volumes. He holds degrees from Dartmouth College and Goldsmiths, University of London and is a PhD candidate in History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. EVENT POSTER ————————- Like us on FACEBOOK Follow us on TWITTER For DIRECTIONS to the Institute please enter “Institute for South Asia Studies” in your google maps or click this GOOGLE MAPS LINK. PARKING INFORMATION Please note that parking is not always easily available in Berkeley. Take public transportation if possible or arrive early to secure your spot. The event is FREE and OPEN to the public.