SFP Montage: day one

SFP Montage is a series of special projects and initiatives linked to Sharjah Arts Foundation’s annual Sharjah Film Platform (SFP) festival that forges new associations among the works and expands their reach beyond Sharjah; two award-winning films from the seventh edition of SFP will be screened at NYUAD: The Screening Room on each of 3 and 4 May. Tomorrow’s films are fiction; this evening’s are both documentaries:

Surveilling a Crime Scene dir Alana Hunt (2023, 22 min)

Shot on Super 8mm, this short examines the lives of non-indigenous people in Miriwoong Country, Australia, to frame colonisation as not only a historical phenomenon but also a continuous and present violence. English with Arabic subtitles

Coconut Head Generation dir Alain Kassanda (2023, 89 min: still above)

Every Thursday a group of students from the University of Ibadan organises a film club, transforming a small lecture hall into a political assembly. Reclaiming the expression ‘coconut head generation’ – a derisive term for stubborn and brainless youth – the students assert their right to intellectual freedom while honing their critical voice. English, Pidgin, Yoruba and French with Arabic subtitles