Drik to host Dhaka premier of ‘Jole Dobe Na’

Naeem Mohaiemen’s film ‘Jole Dobe Na’ will have its Dhaka premiere on January 8. The screening will begin at 6:00pm at the Drik Gallery.

After the show, there will be a question and answer session with Naeem Mohaiemen.

Naeem’s new film ‘Jole Dobe Na’ (Those Who Do Not Drown) is a dreamlike and meditative story about loss and care. In an abandoned hospital, a man moves through empty wards, running an endless memory loop of the last months of his wife’s life. Through his repetitive recall, Naeem’s work expresses how the departed live on in the minds of those left behind. The 64-minute film explores the unique afterlife of caregivers. The film casts Kheya Chattopadhyay, Sagnik Mukherjee and others.

The film is the second film of the ‘Abandoned trilogy’. With this Naeem returns to the themes of ‘Tripoli Cancelled’ that show the family unit as locus for pain-beauty dyads, modernist architecture as staging ground for lost souls, and the necessity of small fictions to keep living. In Tripoli, the protagonist has lived for ten years in abandoned Athens Airport, the boredom of daily life punctuated by letters to his invisible wife, and endless readings of Richard Adams’ dark children’s book Watership Down.

Director Naeem Mohaiemen imagines rhizomatic families, malleable borders, and socialist utopias– beginning from Bangladesh’s two postcolonial markers (1947, 1971) and then radiating outward to unlikely transnational alliances. The idea of a future global left, against current categories of race and religion, drives the work.

‘Tripoli Cancelled’, ‘Two Meetings and a Funeral’ and ‘Prisoners of Sothik Itihash’ are Naeem Mohaiemen’s notable films.