‘Tripoli Cancelled’ starts screening at Bengal Shilpalay
Visual artist and writer Naeem Mohaiemen’s fiction film Tripoli Cancelled started screening at Bengal Shilpalay, recently. Trailing successfully along Documenta 14 and Museum of Modern Art New York, the film was nominated for Turner Prize in 2018.
A panel discussion, featuring Mohaiemen with Sociologist Seuty Sabur, Anthropologist Manosh Chowdhury and Chief Curator of Bengal Foundation Tanzim Wahab will also be held during the inaugural ceremony of the exhibition.
After a decade of making documentaries about Bangladeshi communists from the 1970s, Mohaiemen takes a turn to a different form, which may be referred to as ‘cinema of slow time’. The fiction portrays a lonely man, played by Greek-Iranian actor Vassilis Koukalani, following a daily routine -- smoking, writing letters, and reading from a children’s book. His home for the last decade has been an abandoned airport. The script of the film was inspired from his father’s experience, who was trapped in this same airport for nine days in 1977, after losing his passport during a transit.
Shot in Ellinikon Airport in Greece (built 1969, closed 2001), the place was designed by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen. The film is set amidst a vanished modernist architecture, with a script written in dialogues, inspired from works by Afsan Chowdhury, Hannah Arendt, and Giorgio Agamben. Tripoli Cancelled will be screened on Monday to Saturday, at 4 pm and 6:30 pm, on the second floor of Bengal Shilpalay until March 28.