Re-shift, Re-calibrate
Part One: Samra Mayanja & Touda Bouanani
Curated by Myriam Mouflih

Part One →

10—12 Aug

Samra Mayanja
Touda Bouanani

Part Two →

11—13 Aug

Geoff Clout
Joe Namy
David Steans

Part Three →

12—14 Aug

Amelia Crouch
Jack Pell
Tabita Rezaire
James Thompson

Part Four →

13—15 Aug

Sophie Chapman
& Kerri Jefferis
Rhian Cooke
Karrabing Film Collective

Part Five →

14—16 Aug

Bethan Hughes
Evan Ifekoya
& SJ Rahatoka
Joanne Lee

Part Six →

15—17 Aug

Jenny Handley
Basim Magdy

Films
→ Script for a Wayward Narrator, Samra Mayanja
→ Fragments de mémoires, Touda Bouanani


Unless otherwise indicated, Closed Captions are available for all films. Switch them on via the ‘CC’ icon in the video playbar.

 Audio Accompaniment:
Samra Mayanja & Touda Bouanani talk with Myriam Mouflih about film, family and poetics. This conversation took place remotely on 7 August, between Glasgow, Leeds and Morocco. Live-translated between French and English by Yvon Langué.


Unless otherwise indicated, Closed Captions are available for all films. Switch them on via the ‘CC’ icon in the video playbar.

Script for a Wayward Narrator
Samra Mayanja, 2020, UK, 19 min

Borrowing from Saidiya Hartman’s process of ‘critical fabulation’ (2008), Scripted for a Wayward Narrator constructs slow fictional narratives about two members of the artist’s family and their cyclical road to death and exile. The film is a collision of audio-visual materials drawn from online archives, Ugandan cinema and images circulating through WhatsApp.

Ugandan films integral to the making of this film:

Pearl of Africa (2014, Ashraf Ssemwogerere; Language: Luganda – no English subtitles)

Surreal fears on all sides: Because several episodes aren’t available so I watched them in a random order and so the narrative is surreal in my memory. Loosely, it follows Abassi, who is also the director of the series, as he has to leave the city due to some conflict there.

Fair Play (2013, Cindy Magara; Language: English)

Role play: The playing field of a local mens football team is threatened by encircling property developers. With several pleas to their local politician violently quashed by his henchmen, they decide to become more politically engaged in order to make change for themselves.

Cut That Thing (2012, Matt Bish; Language: Pokot – with English subtitles)

Propaganda necessary, history says: In this didactic film, a young woman is convinced that her misfortune in society is the result of her failing to undergo FGM.

Down This Road I Walk(2017, Mariam Ndagire; Language: English)

Secret love, trapped in window guards: A very young couple in love are broken up by the young girl being promised to an older wealthy man, but their love continues.

Samra Mayanja is an artist with poetics at the centre of her processes. Mayanja predominantly make performances and films as well as writing. Her films are an effort to acknowledge, collect and archive accessible, decentralised and dislocated images of black people and their environments – in an effort to commune disparate voices. Mayanja’s performance practise explores how to generate collectively around and beyond what’s unconceived, lost, discarded, destroyed or arrives in tatters. The artist regularly holds space for contemplation and the creation of experimental reflexive processes with/for others – sometimes through movement work and other times through the creation of sound.

Fragments de mémoires [Fragments of Memory]
Touda Bouanani, 2014, France/Morocco, 19 min

Touda Bouanani traces the career of her father, filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani. She discusses how she goes about rescuing her father’s unpublished manuscripts and archive. Coming from a filmmaking family – her father a filmmaker and editor, her mother a costume designer – Touda explores her own history through her father’s archive.

Touda Bouanani is a Moroccan artist working primarily with film. She is also the daughter of Ahmed Bouanani (1938-2011), a writer, director, and artist fundamental to modern Morocco, whose work Touda has set about preserving and circulating.

This project is part of Film Feels Connected, a UK-wide cinema season, supported by the National Lottery and BFI Film Audience Network. Explore all films and events at filmfeels.co.uk