The LSE Modern World Research Cluster presents Afsan’s Long Day, a film by Naeem Mohaiemen.
Naeem Mohaiemen combines films, photography, drawings, and essays to research forms of utopia-dystopia slippage in South Asia after 1945. He is the author of Midnight’s Third Child (Dhaka: Nokta / University of Liberal Arts, 2023) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 2014); co-editor (w/ Eszter Szakacs) of Solidarity Must be Defended (Budapest: Tranzit / University of Budapest, 2023), co-editor (w/ Lorenzo Fusi) of System Error: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (Sienna: Sylvana, 2007), and editor of Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism (Dhaka: Drishtipat, 2010), Monographs on his artist projects include What We Found After You Left (Toronto: Power Plant, 2021). He is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts and Head of Photography Concentration, at the School of Arts, Columbia University, New York.
Mohaiemen’s archive-based film practice is concerned with shifting borders, unlikely networks of transnational solidarity and the failures of armed leftist movements of the 1970s, a theme that runs across The Young Man Was Series that Afsan’s Long Day forms part of. Thus, United Red Army (The Young Man Was, Part I, 2011) examines the 1977 hijacking of a Japanese commercial airplane by the Japanese Red Army, which had attached itself to the Palestinian cause and to global pan-Arabism. As the film suggests, the hijackers’ decision to land the plane in Dhaka, and the events that followed, were coloured by the Red Army’s misrecognition of Bangladesh’s political landscape at the time. Afsan’s Long Day (The Young Man Was, Part II, 2014), weaves together the account of a young historian, Afsan Chowdhury, persecuted by the Bangladeshi state in the 1970s, with events of the German Autumn and the dissolution of extreme left movements in Europe. Taken together, the films offer a potent depiction of the global 1970s as a departure from the hopeful transnational exchanges that had marked an earlier part of the twentieth century.
Those registered to attend will be sent a link to watch United Red Army and will follow with Afsan’s Long Day in person on the 17th November. Following the film screening, Naeem Mohaiemen will be in conversation with Diva Gujral, LSE Fellow in the Department of International History, and will take questions from the audience.
How to attend the event:
This is a public event open to all. Though, registration is required for each event via Eventbrite
Email ih.events@lse.ac.uk if you have any questions about the event.