Reel Asia: An evening with Three Women Filmmakers

Return to Sender is coming to NYU. Pls join us!

Friday, January 30, 6:00-9:00pm
Michelson Theater, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, 721 Broadway, 6th Floor

In this new edition of Reel Asia, we gather to watch and discuss works by three women filmmakers based in the New York metropolitan area. With roots in Tibet, Pakistan, and India-and creative journeys that span oceans and worlds-Tenzin Sedon, Mara Ahmed, and Jesal Kapadia craft moving images that challenge the boundaries between fiction and documentary, and between film and other media. With great sensitivity and insight, they untangle and re-assemble images, stories, emotions and ideas about colonialism, ethnicity, race, gender, migration, memory, and the environment. Together, they reveal how personal narratives and political histories remain deeply intertwined.

A Road of Prayer (2016) is a documentary filmed between 2015 and 2016, marking the filmmaker’s, Tenzin Sedon, return to her hometown of Lhasa, Tibet, after a long absence. Through the camera, she attempts to touch a homeland and a community that feel at once intimate and unfamiliar. The film weaves together three narrative threads shaped by place, time, and the transformations of urban life. By observing ordinary people along the prayer road (kora), the film becomes a personal journey of reconnection—an exploration of memory, belonging, and the shifting relationship between the city and those who move within it. 98 minutes.

Return to Sender: Women of Color in Colonial Postcards & the Politics of Representation (2023) is a short, experimental film directed and produced by Mara Ahmed. It pushes the documentary medium in unexpected ways by opening with three contemporary South Asian American women who recreate British colonial postcards from the early 20th century. Dressed in lavish traditional attire and jewelry and shot exquisitely in a darkened studio, the women emulate the awkward poses of the postcard women, only to subvert the colonial male gaze and acquire autonomy by choosing an action of their own. This symbolic ‘returning’ of the Orientalist gaze is layered with discussions about Eurocentric beauty standards, representations of South Asian women in media and culture, stereotypes, othering, identity and belonging. The film hopes to create community by facilitating conversations about erasure and the politics of representation. 20 minutes.

‘This is not a…’ (2003) attempts to unravel and re-lexicalize the European avant-garde, by probing the legacy of surrealism, particularly to Rene Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe. The short video performs an ambivalent homage to three ordinary objects used commonly in a south-asian household. The soundtrack consists of three accompanying musical pieces, which are devotional love songs that have no connection with the everyday character of these ‘not objects’. 3 minutes.

She has no land but she keeps sheep: Chapter 2 (2021) is a cinematic journey through Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York, where Jesal Kapadia and Silvia Federici met regularly during the months of the quarantine in 2020, traversing imaginatively through the forest of Assisi in Italy, crossing the cave where Saint Francis lived, leading up to the wooded glimpses of the Himalayan mountains in Sikkim where the activists and monks from the Lepcha tribe had started a hunger strike to prevent the construction of a hydroelectric dam from destroying their sacred lands: thus, the weaving of resistance in geographical areas destroyed by pollution, capitalist greed, the extractivist economy and the colonial expropriation is linked together with what is named as “sacrificed zones” and “sacrificed lives”. Initially imagined as a diary, marking time between living in communal and collective spaces, time inhabited with friends in self-organized residencies and temporary autonomous un-learning zones, She has no land but she keeps sheep is a larger body of work created by Jesal Kapadia and Mattia Pellegrini, from 2014-2023. It is an unorthodox filmic work, both in format and language. Rather, it functions as an archive of images that is constitutively recalcitrant to the order of editing or archiving, opening itself to specific screening or publishing contexts that are alert to calls of renewal and repair in the community. 15 minutes.

Presented by the Asian Film and Media Initiative, the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Media, Culture and History, NYU.

Co-organized by Zhen Zhang (NYU), Debashree Mukherjee (Columbia University) with the assistance of Revantika Gupta and Cristina Cajulis.

MARTIN SCORSESE DEPARTMENT OF CINEMA STUDIES @nyutisch

This is an in-person event, open to the public. Prior registration is required. Non-NYU attendees will receive emailed instructions for building access and may be asked to present a government-issued photo ID upon arrival. NYU attendees must present their NYU ID.

Pls register here.