A Missing Can of Film (2025) by Naeem Mohaiemen
Thursday, October 29, 2026, 7:00 pm
Celluloid Frontiers: A Missing Can of Film and Stop Genocide
Alternative Visions — Program 8
Presented in association with Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Admission: $18 General / $12 Cinematheque Members
Event tickets here
Alternative Visions
September 9–November 18, 2026
This fall BAMPFA’s long-running annual series of historical and contemporary experimental film includes the work of dozens of artists across ten programs, beginning with a program of cinematic investigations into automation and AI with Gibbs Chapman in person. The series continues into November with a program of films made by members of the Oakland-based Black Hole Collective Film Lab. Brydie O’Connor is in person with her archival portrait of queer experimental film pioneer Barbara Hammer. The late Marjorie Keller’s intimate 16mm films have a rare screening to mark the publication of a new book about her work. Artist Naeem Mohaiemen presents and discusses A Missing Can of Film (2025) in conjunction with BAM’s exhibition Private Frontiers. A selection of works made by COUSIN collective artists, including Sky Hopinka’s 2017 consideration of the Dakota Access Pipeline protest and Lindsay McIntyre’s film about caribou and lichen—made using those materials in the photographic process—screen with Lebanese artist Christophe Katrib’s This Dissonance (2024). Harun Farocki’s influential 2003 essay film War at a Distance and Gazan artist Mahmoud Alhaj’s recent videos examine how perception can be limited in the context of war and/or conflict. (Kate MacKay, Film Curator)
Alternative Visions
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Alternative Visions, program 8: Celluloid Frontiers: A Missing Can of Film and Stop Genocide
Co-sponsored by the Institute for South Asia Studies, UC Berkeley; the Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies, UC Berkeley and the South Asia Art Initiative at UC Berkeley.
In Conversation: Naeem Mohaiemen and Tausif Noor
In conjunction with BAM’s exhibition Private Frontiers, BAMPFA presents Naeem Mohaiemen’s A Missing Can of Film (2025). Commissioned by EVA Ireland International and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the film traces the lost-left politics buried within Zahir Raihan’s Stop Genocide (1971)—a film edited in the style of Soviet Realism and Third Cinema during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Raihan, a novelist and director, was abducted only forty-five days after the end of the war. A Missing Can of Film combines scenes from Stop Genocide with footage shot at the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation after the nation’s 2024 July Student “Monsoon” Uprising, interrogating the film canister as a vessel of contested history.
SCREENING: A Missing Can of Film (2025) by Naeem Mohaiemen (Bangladesh/Ireland/India); digital, color, 45 minutes. Source: Naeem Mohaiemen. Stop Genocide (1971) by Zahir Raihan (Bangladesh); digital, B&W, 20 minutes. Source: Topu Raihan and the Zahir Raihan Family.
TRT: 65 minutes