| Date: Saturday, 21 August 2021 Time: 19:30 – 20:30 Colombo | 18:00 – 19:00 Dubai | 15:00 – 16:00 Londo Language: English Following the online screening of Scratches on Celluloid, directors Vindhya Buthpitiya and Timothy Cooper engage in an online dialogue with Sabih Ahmed and Natasha Ginwala expanding on the questions, processes and challenges that went into the making of the film. Buthpitiya, an anthropologist and curator working at the intersection of conflict and visual culture in northern Sri Lanka, and Cooper, an anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker studying religion, ethics and popular media in contemporary Pakistan, discuss the film as an experiment in comparative anthropology that traverses between Jaffna and Lahore through the fraught histories of urban cinema and military operations in the period of 1980s and 90s. The session unpacks further the stories around cinemas as sites of state-enforced amnesia and collective attempts to remember. As part of the programme, Buthpitiya and Cooper share an object history of their film through never-before shown clips of film-posters, tickets and ephemera around celluloid film culture that will form an online resource around this programme on the Ishara platform. |
This event is presented in the context of ‘Reading in Tongues’, a four-part virtual programme organised in partnership with Colomboscope as part of the festival’s seventh edition Language is Migrant. For more information, click here.
Timothy P.A. Cooper
Timothy Cooper (b. 1986) is an anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker based in Oxford, UK, studying religion, ethics, and popular media in contemporary Pakistan. He is a Research Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and an affiliated member of the Max Planck-Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy, and Social Change.
Vindhya Buthpitiya
Vindhya Buthpitiya (b. 1987) is an anthropologist and curator working at the intersection of conflict and visual culture, based in London, UK and Colombo, Sri Lanka. Her current research is focused on war, popular photography and civilian resistance in northern Sri Lanka. Vindhya is a Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University College London.