Doors: 7pm
Talk: 7.15pm
Screening: 7.30pm
Collage: 9.30pm
Come and watch life changing films and listen to a brilliant talk about it beforehand from Curator and Doctor of Arabic studies Zeina Frangie-Eyres, the founder of Other Asias & Sandpit Collective. This time with a collaging workshop at the end!
Other Asias is a film programme presented by the Sandpit Collective in partnership with the University of Sussex. It is inspired by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s challenge to rethink and redefine the idea of “Asia”, as well as the UK’s ethnic classification “Other Asian” used to categorise those who identify as Asian but fall outside its four dominant classifications.
Through film, Other Asias explores the complexities of identity, otherness, and displacement. It reintroduces stories that have been sidelined or distorted by mainstream narratives, inviting both curiosity and critical reflection on whose voices are heard, how they are framed, and what is left out.
The Sandpit Collective and the University of Sussex present the final chapter in their Aswaat / Voices series — a profound journey into female agency within Maghrebi postcolonial and patriarchal spaces.
Four Daughters (Banāt Olfa) بنات ألفة
Director: Kaouther Ben Hania (Tunisia) Year: 2023 • Duration: 107 minutes • Language: Arabic/French with English subtitles
A family’s rupture becomes a site for reckoning. In Four Daughters, Olfa Hamrouni confronts the disappearance of her two eldest daughters. Kaouther Ben Hania weaves documentary and reenactment with haunting empathy where actors stand in for the missing, while real family members inhabit the past and present. It’s a courageous hybrid of memory, identity, and maternal testimony that transcends grief and breaks silences.
In response to Silences of the Palace, which traced inherited silences within the chambers of postcolonial patriarchy, Four Daughters speaks through trauma. Where Alia’s voice was muted by inheritance, Olfa reclaims hers through layered performance and testimony, her pain becoming narrative resistance.
This screening precedes the Tunisian remembrance of Farhat Hached, whose mausoleum was inaugurated on this date in 1955, commemorating the martyr whose voice was extinguished in the fight for freedom. Four Daughters mirrors that legacy, voices lost to ideology and silence but given form and urgency through memory and story.
Post Screening: Join us for ‘Fragments Speak’
A collage, blackout and cut-up workshop inspired by Four Daughters, this workshop invites participants to transform fragments of the past into new stories. Using old texts, colonial, moral, and contemporary, alongside images and affirming words, we’ll cut up, black out, and reassemble language to create personal reflections on voice, womanhood, and agency. A space to reimagine what once hurt, and to find beauty in what remains.