Naeem Mohaiemen

Last Man in Dhaka Central (The Young Man Was, Part 3)

Naeem Mohaiemen

The film unspools the story of Peter, a Dutch man who arrived in Bangladesh in 1973 to report on revolutionary left movements in the new country, and was eventually imprisoned in 1975 by a new military government. Accused of planning a secret leftist uprising, Peter was released after a year of campaigns by Dutch activists.

United Red Army (The Young Man Was, Part I)

Naeem Mohaiemen

September 1977. The Japanese man speaks in halting English; the Bangladeshi negotiator, with the clipped confidence of an army officer. A color scheme suggests order in the exchange: green, red, and the occasional white. The Japanese Red Army had attached to the Palestinian cause, and through that to an idea of global pan-Arabism. The hostage terrain was not an "Islamic Republic," as the hijackers thought, but a turbulent new country ricocheting between polarities and imploding in the process. Instead of being the willing platform for the Japanese Red Army's ideas of "Third World revolution," the actual Third World hit back in unexpected ways, turning the hijackers into helpless witnesses. An eight-year-old watches the television screen with growing confusion-the screen shows an unmoving control tower for hours on end, and he wants his favorite show to start again.

Afsan’s Long Day (The Young Man Was, Part 2)

Naeem Mohaiemen

Exploring the revolutionary left in 1970s Bangladesh through a series of inter-connected vignettes, which draw on Jean-Paul Sartre, Joschka Fischer, Rote Armee Fraktion, and the Sarbahara Party.

Tripoli Cancelled

Naeem Mohaiemen

Vassilis Koukalani

A pilot is trapped in a crumbling, abandoned airport. Naeem Mohaiemen's first fiction film is based on when his father was stranded without a passport in Athens' Ellinikon International Airport for nine days in 1977.

Abu Ammar is Coming

Naeem Mohaiemen

A photograph shows men staring out of a window. The stage is a bombed building. All the men wear military uniforms. Taken by a Magnum photographer in 1982, the image proves to be a teasing enigma. Arabic newspapers claim it as evidence of Bangladeshi fighters in the PLO (Fatah faction).

জলে ডুবে না

Naeem Mohaiemen

Sagnik Mukherjee, Kheya Chattopadhyay

In an empty hospital in Kolkata, India, a man faces protocols of blood, a subtly discriminatory office, and a vacant operating theater. His mind is on a loop of the last months of his wife’s life, when a quiet argument developed. When is the end of pharma-medical care, whose life is it anyway?

Two Meetings and a Funeral

Naeem Mohaiemen

Vijay Prashad, Samia Zennadi

Two Meetings and a Funeral explores Bangladesh’s historical pivot from the socialism of the 1973 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) meeting in Algeria to its ideological counterpoint, the emergence of a strong Islamic perspective at the 1974 Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) meeting in Lahore. Centred on Bangladesh’s navigation of these two historic meetings, as well as its fight for United Nations recognition (vetoed by China, acting as a proxy for Pakistan), the film considers the erosion of the idea of the Third World as a potential space for decolonialism, liberation theology and socialism. In particular, it looks at how a transnational Islamic ‘ummah’ concept was used against socialist forces.