Naeem Mohaiemen and Vincent Meessen: Screening and Discussion

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Saturday, April 4 at 4pm for a screening of two films about the cul-de-sac of unreliable memory: A Missing Can of Film (2025) by Naeem Mohaiemenand Ultramarine (2018) by Vincent Meessen. The screening will be followed by an in-person conversation with both artists.

These two projects are twinned by a shared obsession with the unraveling of the decolonial wave of the late 1960s, the promise of 1968 undone by the friction of realpolitik.
Mohaiemen stages an agonizingly slow search for a mythical film reel, a counterintuitive fragment from South Asia’s second partition that split Pakistan to give birth to Bangladesh. A Missing Can of Film is a montage tribute to the novelist and filmmaker Zahir Raihan, abducted in the aftermath of Bangladesh’s liberation war. Considering the internationalism of Raihan’s last film, Stop Genocide (1971), which invoked Vietnam, Algeria, Auschwitz, and Palestine through Alamgir Kabir’s narration, the attentive audience can glimpse traces of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin(1925), transposing a mutiny on a Russian battleship into a tangled family conflict in rural Bangladesh, and of Raihan's experiments with internationalist cinema.
Another “empty” film reel sets the pace for Meessen’s Ultramarine. Faced with the scarcity of museum objects documenting the production of blue pigment in southwestern France during the Middle Ages, Meessen has a 35mm film reel developed with only its cyan layer fixed. He then tracks down, in his European exile, Gylan Kain (1942-2024), founder of the Original Last Poets and author of Blue Guerrilla (1970), and invites the poet and performer to take up his pen once more, narrating selected objects from the collections of Toulouse’s museums, in the historic land of troubadours. Throughout Kain’s performance with drummer Lander Gyselinck, various museum objects, including funerary figurines, an automaton, an astrolabe, a mappa mundi, and textiles, are juxtaposed with Kain’s own props, invoking affective retrospections on exile and belonging, slave routes, and colonial trade.

Films

Naeem Mohaiemen, A Missing Can of Film (2025, 42 minutes)
A Missing Can of Film revisits the contested legacy of Zahir Raihan, the Bangladeshi novelist and filmmaker best known for Stop Genocide (1971), through the rumor of a missing canister that may have contained politically explosive footage. Intercutting fragments from Raihan’s films with material shot at the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation in the aftermath of the 2024 student uprising, Mohaiemen turns film cans, studio debris, and damaged infrastructures of preservation into witnesses of disputed history. Part elegy, part investigation, the film reflects on the afterlife of revolutionary image-making in Bangladesh and on the unstable line between historical record and political suppression.

Vincent Meessen, Ultramarine (2018, 42 minutes)
Ultramarine is built around a performance by Gylan Kain (1942-2024), a founding member of the Original Last Poets, accompanied by improvised drumming by Lander Gyselinck. Taking blue as chromatic, historical, and discursive principle, Meessen stages what he describes as a kind of narrated exhibition, bringing Kain’s voice into contact with museum objects from Toulouse. Through this transhistorical constellation of objects, the film moves across exile and belonging, slave routes and colonial trade, treating color not as ornament but as a polymorphic material carrier of historical and political memory.

This event is organized in collaboration with UnionDocs. The collaboration also includes a co-presentation of Vincent Meessen’s Just a Movement at UnionDocs on March 29 (more information here).

For more information, contact [email protected].

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to [email protected]. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher e-flux Screening Room