Night School 2025, Lifelines: Unravelings
Film programme with Hind Mezaina

Join us for Night School’s annual film programme curated by Hind Mezaina and featuring four short films about unravelings of: 

a Portuguese coastline;
an American suburb;
memories inside an ancestral house;
and an express subway into symphonic jazz. 

Unravelings is part of Night School 2025, a month-long series of seminars and public events about urbanism and history. More information here.

The screening will be followed by a discussion between Hind Mezaina and Todd Reisz, with audience participation.

The event is free and open to all. Please kindly confirm your attendance by registering here.

Film Programme: 

Daybreak Express (D. A. Pennebaker, 1953, USA, 5 min.)

“I wanted to make a film about this filthy, noisy train and its packed-in passengers that would look beautiful, like John Sloan’s New York City paintings, and I wanted it to go with my Duke Ellington record Daybreak Express.”—D. A. Pennebaker

Golden Jubilee (Suneil Sanzgiri, 2021, India and UK, 19 min., English, Konkani with English subtitles)

What is liberation when so much has already been taken? Who has come for more? The third film in a series about memory, diaspora and decoloniality, takes as its starting point scenes of the filmmaker’s father navigating a virtual rendering of their ancestral home in Goa, India, created using the same technologies of surveillance used by mining companies to map locations of iron ore in the region. A tool for extraction and exploitation becomes a method for preservation.

Coast (Francisco Dias, 2023, Portugal, 13 min., Portuguese with English subtitles)

One winter night, the sea threatens once again the tower block where two neighbours live. The next day, their children come to prompt them to leave everything behind.

The Instability of Clouds (Zazie Ray-Trapido, 2024, USA, 15 min., English)

Two neighbours bond after a shared traumatic event, a continuous home development creeps into nature’s threshold, and a community celebrates freedom. The film navigates an ecosystem in decay and growth while traversing across its spaces of comfort, spectacle and disaster.

Hind Mezaina is an artist, film curator and writer from Dubai. Her interests lie in cinema, cities, visual culture, collective memory and archives. She is also the founder of The Culturist blog and The Culturist Film Club where she hosts and presents film screenings in different venues across the city; and Moving Image Editor at Tribe, a non-profit publication and platform that focuses on photography and moving image from the Arab World. Image credit: Still from The Instability of Clouds, Zazie Ray-Trapido, 2024, courtesy of the filmmaker. 

Film synopsis: For Daybreak Express courtesy of Pennebaker Hegedus Films, the rest courtesy of the filmmakers.