“Last night I dreamt of this river. Come monsoon and it swells with defiance. Playful, unruly and rebellious it refuses to circumscribe the land on its either side. It runs amok upsetting all and assuming nothing except its own freedom. Seeing it make a mockery of its given role of a boundary, even I want to re-draw my maps every season.” Sequence from “Temporary Loss of Consciousness”, D: Monica Bhasin; India – Bangladesh Border, Padma River

No Man’s Land / Everybody’s Land – Glaring in Defiance is a series of screenings that leads us to different corners of histories, creating a space to consider the lines we live by. No Man’s Land borrows from Saadat Hasan Manto’s stories – the choice to refuse a given logic, a given order of the sensical and the non-sensical. This series of interwoven films creates an unwieldy narrative over the three days, it does not follow a nostalgic path nor seek a representation of historical events, instead, No Man’s Land offers a cinematic exploration of partitions, borders and walls.

The screenings offer a dialogue between films from different geographical and time contexts – South Asia, the Middle East and Europe. This dialogue is not just to accentuate known historical and political relations between those places but perhaps to find unforeseen ones.

No Man’s Land is an experiment and an invitation to go on a cinematic journey. A travel that might foster an exilic state of mind where individual and collective stories, sounds and images, make us stop and glare at the fabric of lines we encounter; at lines that enforce departures, fragmentations, occupations and lines that seek to find old and new relations.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/4147