Mobilising Absence: Mariam Ghani on the Precarity of Archival Practices

What We Left Unfinished (2019) emerged out of director Mariam Ghani’s engagement with the Afghan Film archives on a digitisation initiative meant to reinsert Afghan films into wider circulation. A product of five years of research, planning and subsequent execution, the documentary uses archival footage to unravel the contradictory histories of the volatile Communist regime in twentieth-century Afghanistan. Clustered around a period of political turmoil and scattered by war, the films open up a space for conversations in the present moment about covert subversions, national imaginaries and institutional lacunae. Working at the intersection of trauma, memory, loss and reconstruction, Ghani’s body of multimedia work revolves around omissions and unresolved threads at the margins. In tandem, she treads the roles of an archivist, historian as well as translator in retelling Afghan history in her documentary—while retaining its epistemic frictions.

The subsequent Taliban regime’s banning of cinema in the 1990s, burning of reels belonging to the Afghan Film archives and forcing the industry to dissolve (alongside other instances of cultural annihilation) has created an institutional anxiety around film preservation—further exacerbated by their rapid resurgence in the present moment. Ghani insists on the archive as constituting tenacious communities of people who not only construct and maintain it, but also recognise the shift of imperative from the physical to the digital on precarious political terrain. In this continuing conversation, the filmmaker talks about the recuperative impulse that led to the making of the documentary and its engagement with a multifold ecology of public knowledge. In its centrifugal dispersion from the vaults, the archive enters new networks of public memory; What We Left Unfinished is one such work of translation that enables this movement.

What We Left Unfinished (2019) has recently had a theatrical release in the United States of America and is available virtually on the distribution site DEKANALOG.

_{(Featured Image: Afghan Films, Kabul. Still from What We Left Unfinished. Mariam Ghani. 2019. Image courtesy of the artist and Indexical Films.)}

_{Interview taken on 20 July 2021}