Unravelings is part of Night School 2025, a month-long series of seminars and public events about urbanism and history.,  and part of four public events for this year’s edition. Led by architect and writer Todd Reisz, the theme for Night School 2025 is Lifelines, about tracing the paths of movement that shape our environments, and will “consider taking time as requisite for taking care: of a place, of an object, and of life around us.”

The film program features four short films by artists and filmmakers about unravelings of: 
a Portuguese coastline;
an American suburb;
memories inside an ancestral house;
and an express subway into symphonic jazz. 

Daybreak Express
D. A. Pennebaker, 1953, USA, 5 min
“I wanted to make a film about this filthy, noisy train and its packed-in passengers that would look beautiful, like John Sloan’s New York City paintings, and I wanted it to go with my Duke Ellington record Daybreak Express.” —D. A. Pennebaker

Golden Jubilee
Suneil Sanzgiri, 2021, India and UK, 19 min, English, Konkani with English subtitles
What is liberation when so much has already been taken? Who has come for more? The third film in a series about memory, diaspora and decoloniality, takes as its starting point scenes of the filmmaker’s father navigating a virtual rendering of their ancestral home in Goa, India, created using the same technologies of surveillance used by mining companies to map locations of iron ore in the region. A tool for extraction and exploitation becomes a method for preservation.

Coast
Francisco Dias, 2023, Portugal, 13 min, Portuguese with English subtitles
One winter night, the sea threatens once again the tower block where two neighbours live. The next day, their children come to prompt them to leave everything behind.

The Instability of Clouds 
Zazie Ray-Trapido, 2024, USA, 15 min, English
Two neighbours bond after a shared traumatic event, a continuous home development creeps into nature’s threshold, and a community celebrates freedom. The film navigates an ecosystem in decay and growth while traversing across its spaces of comfort, spectacle and disaster.

https://jameelartscentre.org/whats-on/night-school-2025-lifelines/
https://jameelartscentre.org/whats-on/night-school-2025-lifelines-film-programme-with-hind-mezaina-unravelings/