Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her work operates at the intersections of language, loss, migration, memory, and history. Her films, public projects, photographs, and installations have been presented and collected worldwide, notably in Times Square and the new Terminal C at LaGuardia Airport; the Guggenheim, New Museum, MoMA, Smithsonian and Metropolitan Museums; the CCCB in Barcelona, the Secession in Vienna, and Para/Site in Hong Kong; Documenta 13, the Dhaka Art Summit, and the Liverpool, Lahore, Yinchuan, and Sharjah Biennials; and the Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, SFFILM, DOC NYC, Sheffield Doc/Fest, BlackStar, Ji.hlava, and Ann Arbor film festivals. Museum solo shows include the St. Louis Art Museum, the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, the Schneider Museum of Art in Oregon, and the Queens Museum of Art in NYC. Ghani’s first feature film, the critically acclaimed documentary What We Left Unfinished, tells the mostly true story of five unfinished Afghan Communist films. It premiered at the 2019 Berlinale, was released theatrically in the US by Dekanalog, and had its streaming premiere on the Criterion Channel. Her second feature film, Dis-Ease, looks at the real consequences of how we fictionalize disease, and premieres in summer 2024.
Films shown in Divvy Film Festival London 2024
About five unfinished Afghan Communist films, the relationships between art and politics in times of war, censorship and repression, and how the unfinished projects of the past haunt the present
What We Left Unfinished
dir: Mariam Ghani
run time: 1 hr 12 mins.
production year: 2019
language: Farsi (with English Subtitles)
countries: USA, Afghanistan, Qatar
documentary Feature