Performance and Conversation: Jemma Desai

So often in film festivals and cinemas the ‘best practices’ of programming can be fixed and formulaic, resulting in rarefied presentations of cinema which leave little room for deepened engagement. What if instead we thought beyond the film or the filmmaker as being the most reliable receptacle of the ‘meaning’ of a programme?

In this performative lecture, Jemma Desai explores film programming as an embodied and subjective practice by revisiting a short film she has programmed many times: Latifah and Himli’s Nomadic Uncle (1992) by Alnoor Dewshi. In Dewshi’s film, two cousins whose distant ancestors were rural nomads circle around London unfixed in specific time or location. They discuss the repetition of relation across difference: the repetition of the question of identity for those in the diaspora, and the repetition of patterns of colonial extraction and plunder.

Departing from Latifah and Himli’s nomadology, Desai returns to Dewshi’s film to consider it as a location of both repetition and differentiation. In following the connections laid for her in the film, and juxtaposing them with other images and ideas, she yearns for a new form for offering cinema to others. What if instead of calcifying, through inherited practices into the colonial impulse to accumulate, categorise and sanctify, we instead softened into abolitionist methodologies to gather, assemble and be changed by one another?

This event is a collaboration between MIRAGE and the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). 

Whilst in Oslo, Desai will also lead a workshop for an invited group of cultural workers about ‘thinking with yearning’ within cultural institutions. 

Jemma Desai is a cultural worker across film, visual arts and performance and a somatic facilitator working with individuals and groups. Her work attempts a committed engagement with decolonial and abolitionist scholarship and praxis and through this, considers the gap between intention and practice in imagining, making and circulating culture. She has previously worked with the BFI, British Council, LUX and Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival. Current collaborations include United Screens, Blackstar Film Festival in Philadelphia where she is a Programmer and BAM in Brooklyn NY where she is the inaugural Experience Fellow exploring through archival research, somatic facilitation and programming interventions, the possibilities of embodied organisational change. She is currently programmer in residence at The Flaherty Seminar and will be the programmer of the 2025 edition.

MIRAGE is an international film festival dedicated to the collaborative art of cinema and the craft of filmmaking. The festival is a social and creative gathering place where the public experiences art both inside and outside the cinema halls and where you can meet the most groundbreaking artists and filmmakers from the international stage.

MIRAGE Professional is all about the craft and process of filmmaking, with a special focus on creating a hub in Oslo for the professionals behind the collaborative art of cinema: cinematographers, sound designers, directors, and editors to meet and discuss their work.

The festival hands out its acclaimed sculpture awards for Editing, Cinematography, Directing, and Sound Design. A one-person jury decides the award as a recognition from one artist to the other.

​​​​​​Experience MIRAGE between 9 – 13 October 2024 at Vega Scene.