EXPERIMENTA at Ark

Ark Foundation for the Arts hosts a special edition of the festival in Vadodara

January 9-11, 2025

VENUE
FGI Auditorium, Sevasi, Vadodara

FREE ENTRY

PROGRAMME

ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
Curated by Erika Balsom and Shai Heredia
One Way or Another brings together works of feminist nonfiction from diverse contexts that experiment with form to articulate aesthetic and political commitments. The programme takes its name from the English-language title of Sara Gómez’s docufiction De cierta maniera (1977), in homage to the Afro-Cuban filmmaker who passed away in 1974 at the age of only 31, leaving her first and only feature-length film to be posthumously released. At the same time, the phrase “one way or another” – with its invocation of perseverance and its embrace of plurality – provides a way of describing the attitude of the filmmakers included in the programme and the eclectic character of their work. These are films that were made against the odds, in contestation of dominant norms, and which conform to no single aesthetic style or political position. What unites them is the desire to use the moving image, one way or another, to articulate dissent and produce alternative representations of oneself and one’s world.

INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM
Selection Committee Priya Sen, Savyasachi Anju Prabir, Shai Heredia 
The International Program features films by filmmakers from Asia and South East Asia and its diaspora. The films in this program bear witness to the socio-political shifts in their own contexts. They capture moments of cultural reckoning, environmental upheaval, and social resilience across the region and challenge conventional modes of cinema through spirited explorations with sound and image. 

SCHEDULE

DAY 1 | JANUARY 9 | THURSDAY

4:00 PM | ONE WAY OR ANOTHER 1
Curated by Erika Balsom and Shai Heredia

Untitled 77
Han Ok-hee, 1977, South Korea, 16mm (Digital Transfer), Colour, Sound, 7’
Han Ok-hee was a founding member of the Kaidu Club, an experimental filmmaking group initiated in 1974 in Seoul. The group positioned themselves in distinct opposition to the commercialism and patriarchal thrust of mainstream cinema. Untitled 77-A is exemplary of this stance.

Onanism
Nalini Malani, 1969, India, 16mm (Digital Transfer), BW, Sound, 4’
A woman lies alone on a divan, clutching a piece of white fabric between her legs, writhing in what could be ecstasy or pain. This is Malani’s second film produced at the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW), an interdisciplinary art space in Mumbai founded by Akbar Padamsee between 1969-1972.

Les Femmes Palestiniennes
Jocelyne Saab, 1974, Lebanon, 16mm (Digital Transfer), Colour, Sound, 11’
Les Femmes palestiniennes was commissioned by the French television station Antenne 2 but never broadcast. Although it is extant only in a fragmentary state, it remains a powerful document of commitment and struggle.

Autoportrait
Simone Fattal, 1972/2012, Lebanon/France, Digital, BW, Sound, 46’
Interested in the durational and relational possibilities of the moving image, Fattal recorded some seven hours of herself speaking to the camera and with friends, but put the footage aside for some forty years, returning to it only in 2012.



6:00 PM | INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM 1

Films by Robin Riad, Malik Irtiza, Mehdi Jahan, Tenzin Phuntsog, Laisul Hoque, Elysa Wendi, LEE Wai Shing. 


Abgad Hawaz
Robin Riad, 2024, Canada, Digital, Colour, Sound, 1.30’
Learn the Arabic alphabet in 28 easy steps!

Thokei
Malik Irtiza, 2024, Kashmir, Digital, Colour, Sound, 4.52’
“Thokei” (Kashmiri for spits) follows Shokapaseen, a non being from void(s). The news of Shokpaseen entrusting sound capsules to fish in the Sindh valley is revealed, as the fish do a sporadic broadcast of this encounter and location of the capsules for dreamers.

What would have been there had there been nothing?
Mehdi Jahan, 2023, India, Digital, Colour, Sound, 7’
“My mother, who survived a couple of strokes, has a fear of developing amnesia and forgetting her loved ones. She is haunted by a recurrent nightmare in which as a young girl she’s chased by a mob. This film is an attempt to reflect on the relationship between my mother’s fear of her amnesia and the collective amnesia of a nation.” MJ

Pure Land
Tenzin Phuntsog, 2023, USA/Tibet, Digital, Colour, Sound, 16’
A son traverses remote and dramatic natural landscapes in the United States in an effort to capture images resembling his mother’s native Tibet.

The Purpose was to Document the Other Side
Laisul Hoque, 2023, Bangladesh/UK, Digital, Colour, Sound, 14’
Exploring intergenerational trauma, emotional distance, and healing within a South Asian family, this film follows the artist’s mother’s journey to London, recorded on the same camera his father used in 2004 to document his own travels through Europe, when he couldn’t bring his family along.

Room 404
Elysa Wendi & LEE Wai Shing, 2023, Hong Kong/Poland, Digital, Colour, Sound, 29’
A never-ending typhoon outside of room 525 in Hong Kong has transposed an artist duo into an unsettling situation of digital error of 404 in the present time. Inspired by the concept of Room 666 by Wim Wenders, Elysa Wendi and Wai Shing Lee invited various artists to the hotel room 525 during an art residency in 2019.

DAY 2 | JANUARY 10 | FRIDAY


4:00 PM  | INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM 2

Films by Shambhavi Kaul, Mahdi Awada, Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige, Gavati Wad, Pobwarat Maprasob: Dome

Slow Shift
Shambhavi Kaul, 2023, USA/India, Digital, Colour, Sound, 9’
Langurs contemplate their world as it changes around them. In Slow Shift, humans, animals, music, and rock are entangled. The film playfully interrogates various intersections: real and mythic, lived and preserved, human and animal, and ancient and geological timescales.

Notes on Sanity
Mahdi Awada, 2022, Lebanon, Digital, Colour, Sound,  6.31
By combining moving images, photography, and voice narration, this film delves into the layered history of Lebanon’s first mental asylum established in 1898 by a Swiss Quaker missionary.

Sarcophagus of Drunken Loves
Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige, 2024, Lebanon/France, Digital, Colour, Sound, 8’
Today, in Lebanon, power cuts are not an event, they are a new state.  Even the museum is often deprived of electricity.  But visitors want to see, despite everything.

O Seeker
Gavati Wad, 2024, India, Digital, Colour, Sound, 19’
While she waits to fall asleep every night, a young girl confronts her fears and anxieties about human existence, the news media and the cosmos. O Seeker considers the relationship between science, politics, spirituality and superstition in India, as it weaves a puzzle of unresolved questions through conversations about grief, loss and absurd events, real and imagined.

Did you see the hole that mom dig?
Pobwarat Maprasob: Dome, 2022, Thailand, Digital, Colour, Sound, 26.37’
During Songkran, a holiday in Thailand, the filmmaker visits his grandmother’s house. The house is filled with laughter and home-cooked meals, but there’s also a melancholic air as they remember their recently deceased grandfather. As night falls and everyone drifts into sleep, a subtle, unexplainable presence seems to awaken in the shadows.


6:00 PM | ONE WAY OR ANOTHER 2
Curated by Erika Balsom and Shai Heredia

Eyes of Stone
Nilita Vachani, 1990, India, 16mm (Digital Transfer), Colour, Sound, 94’
Eyes of Stone is a film about spirit possession and healing, shot in the desert interiors of Bhilwara district, Rajasthan, India. The film explores the rituals of faith, healing, possession and rebellion that thrive within the confines of a stringent patriarchal order.

DAY 3 | JANUARY 11 | SATURDAY


12:00 PM | INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM 3


A Frown Gone Mad
Omar Mismar, 2024, Lebanon, Digital, Colour, Sound, 71.12’
In a Lebanese beauty salon, Bouba works on her clients with Botox and fillers. Together, they fearfully ruminate about the possibility of a war. They vent their worries as they paralyze their expressions. The rampant culture of Botox and filler is reframed here as an extension of war and perpetual bouts of violence witnessed today.

2:00 PM | INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM 4

Films by Mahishaa, Mahmoud Ibrahim, JT Trinidad, Chantal Partamian, Bo Wang


Babasaheb in Bengaluru
Mahishaa, 2024, India, Digital, Colour, Sound, 4.41’
Across the metropolitan city of Bengaluru you cannot escape the imagery of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in multiple forms, as a sign of assertion from India’s subaltern marginalized castes. This film is a dedication to those who have kept Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s philosophy alive.

The Last Day
Mahmoud Ibrahim, 2024, Egypt, Digital, Colour, Sound, 5’
Brothers Ziad and Moody spend their last moments in the family home they’re forced to leave due to a scheduled demolition as part of the city’s development plans. To pass the time while they move the furniture outside, Moody turns on the TV.

the river that never ends
JT Trinidad, 2022, Philippines, Digital, Colour & BW, Sound, 19’
Along the Pasig River that faces major changes as an expressway is constructed, Baby, a middle-aged transwoman, shuttles between her job as a companion-for-hire for strangers and her duty to her father.

Traces  آثار
Chantal Partamian, 2023, Lebanon/Canada, Digital, Colour, Sound, 8.45’
Beirut 1980s. Amid the rubble of a torn building, a reel of film.  An unlikely unraveling of queer bodies taking shape and form, while the war-torn city around and its spectacle of toxic masculinity glitches and disintegrates.

An Asian Ghost Story
Bo Wang, 2023, Hong Kong/Netherlands, Digital, Colour, Sound, 37’
Wigs were vital for the rise of the Asian economy in the post-war era. Between Mao’s China – the largest source of hair supplies – and the insatiable Western market, Hong Kong functioned as the gateway. In 1965, the U.S. imposed an embargo on “Asiatic hair”, cutting off foreign currency to Communist China. This film examines the role of Hong Kong as a transient space that mediates and sanitizes the connection between different worlds.

4:00 PM | SPECIAL FEATURE

Badnam Basti
Prem Kapoor, 1971, India, 35mm (Digital Restoration), BW, 112’
Digital restoration by Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art, National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC)
and Film Heritage Foundation

Badnam Basti  is the debut film of Prem Kapoor, considered one of the filmmakers from the Indian New Wave. This artfully shaped musical melodrama is an adaptation of Kamleshwar Prasad Saxena’s eponymous story from 1957 (published in English as A Street With 57 Lanes) about a ménage-a-trois relationship. The film is considered India’s first queer film. It briefly appeared in public in 1971, only to disappear immediately thereafter until a 35mm print was found in the archive of the Arsenal Institute of Film and Video Art.