Minor History

2019

Documentary feature film (71:01)

 

Minor History is a portrait of Wahid Mohammed, the director’s 90-year-old uncle, who was born in British India in the 1920s and later fled to Pakistan, where he became a general in the army, before settling in Buffalo, New York, where he has lived since in 1982. The film observes Wahid’s doings and movements, spending time with him at the cramped apartment in the nursing home where he lives, playing pool, and visiting a zoo. His friendship with an Indian woman hired to cook for him, and his interactions with his nephew Asad are also documented.

 

This settled attention, brought to bear on one human life, attests to the way in which identity cannot be made stable or fixed: from every perspective, and within each new context, it shifts and fragments. Above all, Minor History seeks to maintain the subject’s ‘right to opacité’: an account of a life must both bear witness to what is revealed in memory, in recounting, in dialogue – traces documenting the forces that shape a life - and to the part of human subjectivity that cannot be expressed or known.

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Produced with the financial support of International Film Festival Rotterdam. European première: IFFR 2019