Jameel Arts Centre: Night School 2025 Film Night - Unravelings
Please join me on Saturday, January 25 for an evening of short films I curated for Night School 2025 at Jameel Arts Centre, and part of 4 public events for this year’s edition.
Led by architect and writer Todd Reisz, this year’s Night School theme is Lifelines, about tracing the paths of movement that shape our environments, and will “consider taking time as requisite for taking care: of a place, of an object, and of life around us.”
Below is information about the film night which is free to attend, and you can register here.
Last year’s film night was lovely, with meanigful thoughts and questions discussed between Todd, myself and the audience. I wrote about it here, and Shama Nair reviewed it and the other Night School events of 2024 here.
Hope you can join us (again) for this.
Night School 2025, Lifelines: Unravelings
Film programme with Hind Mezaina
January 25, 6.00-8.00pm
Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (location map)
Join us for Night School’s annual film programme curated by Hind Mezaina and featuring four short films about unravelings of:
a Portuguese coastline;
an American suburb;
memories inside an ancestral house;
and an express subway into symphonic jazz.
Unravelings is part of Night School 2025, a month-long series of seminars and public events about urbanism and history. The screening will be followed by a discussion between Hind Mezaina and Todd Reisz, with audience participation.
Daybreak Express
D. A. Pennebaker, 1953, USA, 5 min
“I wanted to make a film about this filthy, noisy train and its packed-in passengers that would look beautiful, like John Sloan’s New York City paintings, and I wanted it to go with my Duke Ellington record Daybreak Express.” —D. A. Pennebaker
Golden Jubilee
Suneil Sanzgiri, 2021, India and UK, 19 min, English, Konkani with English subtitles
What is liberation when so much has already been taken? Who has come for more? The third film in a series about memory, diaspora and decoloniality, takes as its starting point scenes of the filmmaker’s father navigating a virtual rendering of their ancestral home in Goa, India, created using the same technologies of surveillance used by mining companies to map locations of iron ore in the region. A tool for extraction and exploitation becomes a method for preservation.
Coast
Francisco Dias, 2023, Portugal, 13 min, Portuguese with English subtitles
One winter night, the sea threatens once again the tower block where two neighbours live. The next day, their children come to prompt them to leave everything behind.
The Instability of Clouds
Zazie Ray-Trapido, 2024, USA, 15 min, English
Two neighbours bond after a shared traumatic event, a continuous home development creeps into nature’s threshold, and a community celebrates freedom. The film navigates an ecosystem in decay and growth while traversing across its spaces of comfort, spectacle and disaster.