SOLD OUT
CLOSING NIGHT
For this closing night a presale ticket is required, for Friends of Courtisane, guests and accredited a reservation is required.
Since the 1980s, Alia Syed has been making films that draw from personal and historical realities in order to address the subjective relationship to gender, location, diaspora and colonialism. Her work resists the linearity of the film strip and of traditional narrative structures, using layering and repetition – enfolding fact, fiction, present and past. This special screening to mark the publication of Alia Syed: Imprints, Documents, Fictions (ed. María Palacios Cruz) centres on a series of works from the last ten years that reflect on the filmmaker’s Asian-Scottish upbringing. Published by Courtisane festival in collaboration with Open City Documentary Festival, Alia Syed: Imprints, Documents, Fictions is the first monograph to be devoted to Syed’s work and features new essays by Jemma Desai, Inga Fraser, Peter Gidal, Rahila Haque, Salima Hashmi, Anjana Janardhan, Ruth Noack and Henrietta Williams, as well as writing by Syed herself.
In the presence of Alia Syed
After decades of film screenings and many years of Courtisane festival at Paddenhoek, this will be our very last festival program at this venue. The building will be renovated and unfortunately the cinema will disappear. We invite you to join us at Paddenhoek for a drink after this screening.
The objects and places we cannot leave behind create the tapestry that is Points of Departure. Exploring themes of personal and collective memory through my relationship to the city of Glasgow, a voice-over describes a tablecloth I retrieved whilst clearing my elderly father’s house. The film attempts to unravel the threads of memory held within this mundane item and to find an image within the BBC archive that relates to my memories of growing up in Glasgow. My father’s unrehearsed attempts to translate an Urdu Ghazal discovered in the archive, a poetic expression of the beauty of love and the pain of loss exposes a process of translation that becomes the key allowing a path through the labyrinth of both my own memory and the BBC archive. (Alia Syed)
English & Urdu spoken
Alia Syed hones a moving image poem out of the personnel reminiscences of Mr Ghulam Rasul Tahir and Mr Mohammed Ali Azad whose lived experiences of working for Glasgow Bus Corporation defy our expectations. Filming with a 16 mm camera on the Dumbarton Road in Glasgow, Syed responds to a shot she found in the archives of BBC Scotland of a funeral cortege walking through the same streets in 1969. An oral lament by Hardeep Deerhe responds to the traditional Scottish tune When the Battle’s O’er (played by Ross Ainslie), creating an acoustic envelope to this haunting vignette. (Channel 4)
English spoken
“This tape is made from Hi8 video that my father shot.” Through visual analysis and hypnotic repetition, Syed reappropriates footage shot by her father on a snowy day in the winter of 1995/96, at a time when the filmmaker and her father were not speaking to one another. Snow blends different temporalities – of the original footage, of the filmmaker’s first watching in 2017 and her subsequent viewings in 2019 – time and repetition shifting the filmmaker’s assumptions about the images and her late father, who is both present and absent. (María Palacios Cruz)
English spoken
