Winchester School of Arts hosts award-winning film maker Nausheen Khan
Our Material Interests 2024 series came to a close in June. Our final event was a screening of Nausheen Khan's Land of my Dreams. Dr Kai Syng Tan followed the screening with a conversation with Nausheen. Dr Kai Syng Tan is Associate Professor in Arts and Cultural Leadership at WSA.
Land of my Dreams is Nausheen's feature documentary. It highlights the voices of the protesters of India’s Citizenship Amendment Act. It also includes the filmmaker's perspective as a Muslim woman.
Attendees enjoyed a lively conversation between Kai and Nausheen. Topics included the power of the camera as a responsive tool of documentation and change. They also examined the filmmaker’s creative process. What are the costs – and rewards – of ‘making depressing films’ as an ‘angry’ and highly-visible person of colour?
Another topic of discussion was gender. Why does change disproportionately adversely affect women? They explored the true meaning of solidarity and collective liberation too. The film featured Muslim women, as well as other minoritised groups from the transgender and Punjabi communities. It incited conversation around the thrilling tension of the local-global.
This session was critical to learn more about ways to decolonise the curriculum. It showed how arts and cultural leadership can drive change. They can fight Islamophobia, threats to human rights and democracy, and misogyny. This is relevant to the Global South and beyond.
It was inspiring to see this from the perspective of a young feminist filmmaker.
Nausheen’s next ambitious project, previewed at the event, has an environmental justice focus. She joins a nomadic community in India and together they track an endangered deer species.
MA Fine Art alumni Manjira Mazumdar also spoke at the event. She is an emerging multimedia artist and itinerant Gen Z member of the Indian diaspora.
About Nausheen Khan
Nausheen is an independent filmmaker based in India. She works on gender perspectives amid conflict and political unrest in contemporary times. Land of My Dreams is her first self-financed feature-length documentary film. It won Best Long Documentary at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala 2023. It also received the Citizens’ Prize at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2023.
Photo credit: Tianyi Wang