Hira Nabi works with images and text to tell stories of the everyday. Her practice is concerned with the environment, the often unseen, and a slow process of re-earthing: by which she intends to shift focus away from anthropocentric stories into a more interconnected and larger witnessing of the times we live in. She earned a BA in film and postcolonial studies from Hampshire College, and an MA in cinema and media studies from The New School. She lives and works in Lahore, Pakistan, where she is teaching at the Beaconhouse National University, and researching cinematic cultures, and botanical movements and plant migrations in South Asia.

Films shown in Divvy Film Festival 2024

How to love a tree (prologue)

dir: - Hira Nabi

run time: 14 min

production year: 2024

documentary short

synopsis: In her live multichannel performance ‘How to Love a Tree’, Hira Nabi weaves together whispered narratives from sylvan landscapes, misty mountain sides, ghosts of extraction and British imperialism, inviting us into forest time. Part of an ongoing artistic project, launched in 2019, ‘How to Love a Tree’ documents the former colonial hill stations in the blue pine forests of Murree and the Galiyat region of Pakistan. Nabi sees these places as ecosystems that are crumbling, marked by a history of imperial rule. She focuses on making remnants of this painful past visible in what are now tourist destinations in the hills. Here, traces of exploitation mingle with expressions of capitalism, while the deterioration of the environment continues.

Films shown in Divvy Film Festival 2020

El Retorno, Hira Nabi, 2016
A taxi driver agrees to drive a stranger around a town the man has never visited. Their short journey gives the man a new destination.

All That Perishes At The Edge Of Land, Hira Nabi, 2019
A decommissioned vessel berthed at Gadani and the shipbreakers coming from all over Pakistan to break it discover that they might have more in common than otherwise imagined, when they enter into a conversation.