Good Ended Happily

Visual artist Basir Mahmood is curious to see what happens if he leaves the filming to others. In Monument of Arrival and Return, he kept away from the film set, and sent his instructions to a local crew remotely. This time, for Good Ended Happily, he merely sketched a framework within which his work was to be executed by an independent crew from the film industry in Lahore, Pakistan—known as “Lollywood.” All he told them was that they had to reconstruct the U.S. Special Forces operation in which the Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed.

The artist left the realization of the film entirely to the imagination of the crew, who thus had the space to portray the military operation according to their own ideas. This new reality, partly filmed in first-person perspective, lies somewhere between the actual events and a fictional story. It has deliberately become an imperfect reconstruction, located in the exciting realm between the intention of the artist and the interpretation of the film crew.