Sharjah Art Foundation collaborates with NYU Abu Dhabi

Sharjah24: Sharjah Art Foundation, in collaboration with The Arts Center and the Film and New Media Program at NYU Abu Dhabi, presents four award-winning films from the seventh edition of Sharjah Film Platform (SFP) through an initiative titled SFP Montage. The films will be screened at NYUAD: The Screening Room on 3 and 4 May 2025.

SFP Montage is a series of special projects and initiatives linked to the Foundation’s annual film festival that forges new associations among the works and expands their reach beyond Sharjah.

Two documentary films will be screened on 3 May: the short Surveilling a Crime Scene (2023), which exposes the ongoing impact of colonisation in Australia, and the feature Coconut Head Generation (2023), in which Nigerian university students turn their film club into a space for political and intellectual resistance.

The fiction films to be presented the next evening are Upshot (2024), a short depicting an isolated couple grappling with their children’s life choices after personal tragedy, and the feature film Cu Li Không Bao Giờ Khóc (Cu Li Never Cries) (2024), in which the protagonist confronts the ghosts of her past while worrying about her niece’s future.

These film screenings are open to the public, and tickets are free.

Full screening information and film descriptions are given below:

3 May | 7:00 pm

Surveilling a Crime Scene (2023)

Director: Alana Hunt

Australia

Documentary | 22 minutes

English with Arabic subtitles

Shot on Super 8mm film, Surveilling a Crime Scene examines the lives of non-Indigenous people in Miriwoong Country, northwest Australia, to frame colonisation as not only a historical phenomenon but also a continuous and present violence. Weaving connections between various subjects—a dam, a historical monument, agriculture, tourism, a police station, tortured bodies and bureaucracy—the film lays bare the tools and techniques of power and oppression.

Coconut Head Generation (2023)

Director: Alain Kassanda

France, Nigeria

Documentary | 89 minutes

English, Pidgin, Yoruba and French with Arabic subtitles

Every Thursday, a group of students from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria organises a film club, transforming a small lecture hall into a political assembly. Reclaiming the expression ‘coconut head generation’—a derisive term for stubborn and brainless youth—the students assert their right to intellectual freedom while honing their critical voice.

4 May | 7:00 pm

Upshot (2024)

Director: Maha Haj

Palestine, Italy, France

Fiction | 34 minutes

Arabic with English subtitles

After suffering unimaginable loss, Suleiman and Lubna retreat to an isolated farm, where they tend to their crops and engage in impassioned debates about their five children’s life choices. One day a stranger arrives to reveal a harrowing truth from their past.

Cu Li Không Bao Giờ Khóc (Cu Li Never Cries) (2024)

Director: Phạm Ngọc Lân

Vietnam, Singapore, France, Philippines, Norway

Fiction | 92 minutes

Vietnamese with Arabic and English subtitles

After picking up the ashes of her estranged husband from Germany, Mrs Nguyen travels back to Hanoi with Cu Li, his pet pygmy slow loris, a primate native to the Vietnamese rainforest. Upon her return, she finds her pregnant niece rushing into marriage and fears the young woman is making the same mistakes that she did. The film weaves together the present moment with the complex echoes of Vietnamese history by interspersing the old woman’s longing for the past with the couple’s uncertain future.