A Journal of Longing: Obaid Mustafa’s Here Is Where We Meet Again

Obaid Mustafa’s film Here Is Where We Meet Again (2022), which recently had its Indian premiere at the Kolkata People’s Film Festival 2023, is an elliptical journey across landscapes of displacement, longing and homesickness. Mustafa, an alumnus of the DocNomads programme, is currently based between New York and Lahore. The film reads as a journal pieced together with admirable prudence. It appears neither emotionally overdone nor altogether parched of sentimentality as it traverses these all-too-familiar themes.  

Ensconced in a small 12×15 square feet room away from home, the director hones a deeply felt narratorial voice that is perfused with an enduring sense of unsettlement. He yearns for his homeland and his seventy-year-old mother, who feels increasingly unsure of whether she will be able to witness the next spring. There is an understated cyclical rhythm in the nineteen and a half minutes of the film’s playtime; yet owing to peculiar messiness, it does not feel monotonous.

As the camera’s gaze touches familiar objects and spaces—walls strewn with childhood photographs, a stalk of lilies, a carpet braced by oblique rays of the sun, or a window serving as the filmmaker’s playground—the viewer is reminded that longing is not an ungrounded expression. It remains materially imbued in tangible things, as well as language and everyday gestures. 

Despite ruminations by the narrator, a pregnant silence underscores the film. This silence is not merely a non-utterance, for it shelters his geographic, temporal, and sensorial dislocations in a generative way. “I should have been somewhere else, where I do not wait for anything—letters, phone calls, or death,” says Mustafa, invoking his situated presence as a reflection of alterity. But what renders his cinematic voice unique is his formal and structural enunciation of psychic bi-location—a state of being in two different places at a given moment. Mustafa straddles two different worlds in the film while working with a layered audio-visual design built out of his current physical location.

The meditative attention to the filmmaker’s inhabited surroundings recurrently breaks into dual-channel screens depicting landscapes and visual associations that tie him to a place left behind. The relationality between the frames enacts variable visual compositions—in motion and stillness—to mobilise an inimitable playfulness. Sometimes the frames maintain a formal correlation with each other, but at other times they nurture a rhetorical resonance similar to symbolist poetry.

The dual-screen frames manifest vacillating relations of meaning-making in the manner of what Harun Farocki calls a “soft montage.” Contrary to Sergei Eisenstein’s formulation of montage theory, where visuals progress dialectically through oppositions and contradictions, Farocki uses this term to articulate the general relatedness of images in conjunction. His multichannel installations demonstrate how images react and fold into one another within the same spatial field to generate semantic variability.

In the film, the formal trope of soft montage serves as a processual exercise for Mustafa to think through the possibilities of being elsewhere in his situated reality. The film as textual praxis becomes the site for envisioning alterity, mapped by quotidian visuals, personal anecdotes, poetic fragments, vocal tracks, or snatches from telephonic conversations. This sense of dislocation informs the heart of the film’s hybrid, multimodal structure. 

Mustafa constructs a composite language as he traces his emotional states through distinctive technical and aesthetic variations. From still frames to extended pans, or extreme close-ups to long shots, he seems unafraid to suture together disjointed parts while resisting blanket containment within predictable tropes. Undoubtedly, it is a remarkable feat for a short essay film dealing with themes that are not entirely unfamiliar. 

In a nod to its titular phrase, Here is Where We Meet Again manifests as a reflective site where Mustafa encounters the shadows of his past across changing spatial and temporal locations. Given the film's diaristic style, it is inexcusable to extract Mustafa’s cinematic orientations from personal attachments. Nonetheless, one cannot disregard Mustafa's keen sensitivity, reflected in the film, and the promise of the fertile cinematic language he bears. 

All image stills from Here Is Where We Meet Again (2022) by Obaid Mustafa. Images courtesy of the artist and the Kolkata People’s Film Festival 2023.