Narrative us Recite

Artistic Research Week 2025 | Master of Film | Part of the Keep an Eye Filmacademie Festival

Narrative Us Recite is a discursive presentation by Basir Mahmood, reflecting on his decade-long artistic research into the Lahore-based film industry known as Lollywood. Once among the world’s largest film industries, Lollywood experienced a dramatic collapse in the late 1970s. Growing up in a neighborhood where its main studios stood, Mahmood witnessed the slow disappearance of its traces—including a personal connection through a song his father wrote for an unfinished film. In this presentation, he explores how artistic research becomes a generative tool to confront disappearance, transforming archival absences into creative possibilities. Rather than preserving Lollywood’s ruins, Mahmood asks: how can a film industry be considered ended if it still holds the potential to tell? What forms of storytelling emerge from spaces marked by denial, disappearance, and erasure? Can the medium of film itself become an imagined site for those physical locations that have been taken away?