Film information:
Roxy Farhat, Zhala Rifat, Acting Woman, 2017, Sweden, 5 minutes
Omar Chowdhury, BAN♥️ITS, 2024, Bangladesh, Belgium, South Korea, 18 minutes
Sarah Browne, The Laughable, 2025, Ireland, UK, 33 minutes
Selected by aemi for Docs Ireland, this screening brings together three recent works, each radically different but engaging with humour and performance in ways that unravel our expectations. The programme opens with Roxy Farhat and Zhala Rifat’s Acting Woman in which two women adopt a single pose and then hold it, locking the viewers as well as themselves into a silent struggle with the camera. This is followed by Omar Chowdhury’s BAN♥️ITS, one of the most notable highlights at this year’s IFFR, which effectively blurs the lines between documentary and fiction in its depiction of a group of outlaws on the borders of Bangladesh and India who are obsessed with Heath Ledger’s Joker. The programme closes with the premiere of The Laughable, a new experimental documentary by artist and filmmaker Sarah Browne that explores what is laughed at, and who has the power to laugh, through the performances of six disabled comedians. In the absence of either a laugh track or a live audience for the recording, the question falls to the collective cinema audience.
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with artist and filmmaker Sarah Browne led by aemi co-director Alice Butler
°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°
BIOS & SYNOPSES
Roxy Farhat
Roxy Farhat (born 1984 in Tehran, Iran) is an artist and director currently based in Stockholm, Sweden. Her artistic practice includes a range of expressions: performance, video art, music videos, film, and more, where feminism, anti-capitalism and absurdity are recurring themes.
https://www.roxyfarhat.com/
Acting Woman
Acting Woman is a performance work for video that embodies the physical and mental work of living up to the image of the woman.
°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°
Omar Chowdhury
Omar A. CHOWDHURY (1984, Bangladesh) is a Bengali artist and filmmaker living between Brussels and Dhaka. Originally trained in industrial relations and information systems, he now produces parafictional installations, films, and performances which animate the ambiguities and ruptures of diasporic life. Chowdhury is an immigrant from Bengal, and this is reflected in his layered installations. His work has been exhibited worldwide and he has been the recipient of international grants and commissions, as well as an Australian Cinematographers Society Gold Award.
https://omarchowdhury.com/
BAN♥️ITS
On the lawless eastern border between Bangladesh and India, lives a group of proud bandits, obsessed with Heath Ledger’s Joker. Re-enacting their past and celebrating their outsider status, they philosophise on their role in society, and the balance between order and chaos. In BAN♡ITS, not just the borders between states are unclear, but the borders between fiction and documentary blur, and ultimately, as do the borders between resistance, art and crime.
°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°
Sarah Browne
Sarah Browne is an artist who works with spoken and unspoken, bodily experiences of knowledge, labour and justice. Her practice involves sculpture, film, performance and publishing. Often working in collaboration with formal and informal experts (children, lawyers, poets), she aims to create new communities of knowledge through artmaking. Her recent public projects include Echo’s Bones (a film-making project with autistic young people in North Dublin, responding to the work of Samuel Beckett) and Public feeling (a programme of participatory performances in South Dublin leisure centres). Her solo exhibitions include Kunstverein Aughrim, Co. Wicklow; Sirius Arts Centre, Co. Cork; Marabouparken, Stockholm; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; CCA Derry~Londonderry; Project Arts Centre, Dublin; Ikon, Birmingham and CAG, Vancouver. In 2020 she curated TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, with a project titled The Law is a White Dog.
www.sarahbrowne.info
@sarahjaybrowne
The Laughable
This experimental documentary explores what is laughed at, and who has the power to laugh, through the performances of six disabled comedians. In the absence of either a laugh track or a live audience for the recording, the question falls to the collective cinema audience.
Fully captioned and with audio description available.
Commissioned by Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures at the University of Leeds. Funded by the Wellcome Trust Public Enrichment Award and supported by The Arts Council / An Comhairle Ealaíon
