Forty-five days after Bangladesh became independent in December 1971, Zahir Raihan, one of the key figures of Bengali cinema from the region, went missing at the age of 36. He had gone looking for his brother, a writer, who had disappeared during the war. Raihan is suspected to have been abducted and killed, presumably by the Pakistan army.

That’s the narrative that visual artist and writer Naeem Mohaiemen, 57, says he grew up hearing—even though that did not make sense: how could the Pakistan army operate in a newly independent Bangladesh, let alone murder a prominent figure like Raihan? It’s only in the last 15 years or so that Mohaiemen, who’s based in New York and Dhaka, started to learn about a missing can of film. A film Raihan had made that apparently held secrets that could “embarrass the war command” of the newly formed state. It got Mohaiemen, whose practice has been described as an investigation of “failed leftist utopias and incomplete decolonisations”, interested.

Raihan’s political commitments were deeper than his filmography might suggest—he made about a dozen films and wrote eight novels. He had been a member of the Communist Party for years, even as he built a successful career making popular cinema: family dramas and entertainers, including Pakistan’s first colour film, Sangam (1964), in Urdu. It was only towards the end of his life that the politics became impossible to separate from the filmmaking.

Jibon Theke Neya (1970), a domestic melodrama that doubled as an allegory of East Pakistan, marked the turn. During the Liberation War, Raihan moved to Kolkata and became part of the cultural front of the independence movement, making the 20-minute documentary, Stop Genocide, his masterpiece and a landmark political film of the war. He was also involved in several other films during this period, including the unfinished Let There Be Light, which was described as an “ode to human suffering through the ages”, and the film whose supposed existence gives Mohaiemen’s project, its title.

It is this brief, volatile phase that Mohaiemen is after in his video installation A Missing Can of Film (2025). “I wanted to trace the genealogy of Raihan’s brief, liminal socialist cinema,” he wrote in an essay in February this year for The Daily Star, “or what I call the ‘Socialist Stillborn’ formed under the crucible of a liberation war in which the communist parties were not allowed a central role.” A Missing Can of Film reflects on this unfinished history and the idea of revolution, while attempting to enter his unrealised cinema through the films he left behind. The film is part of Mohaiemen’s exhibition Raihan-Ghatak-Tarkovsky, on at Experimenter, Hindustan road, Kolkata, until 10 October.

Mohaiemen traces that unrealised cinema largely through Raihan’s own images. Archival footage from across his filmography is cut together in unexpected combinations: a scene from one of his Urdu films converses with one from a Bengali film; songs, dances, faces and bodies recur across different films and different registers. There are split-screens, with images playing simultaneously; sometimes one panel goes black while the others continue.

It becomes a sensory trip through an archive, with Mohaiemen making Raihan’s films speak to one another rather than simply illustrating his story. “In Missing Can I search for Zahir Raihan within his own film archive,” he writes. The language of the film is fluid: archival footage, contemporary images, scraps of sound and text that sometimes resembles inter-titles are spliced together into a shifting tapestry. Visual and aural echoes travel between Raihan’s films and the images Mohaiemen has shot himself.

Those contemporary images come from the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation (BFDC), filmed in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 student uprising. Rusting equipment, empty spaces, machines and corridors acquire an eerie quality. Mohaiemen lingers over them, allowing the BFDC to become a site from where one political moment contemplates another. In red letters, the film asks: Is this the nation they wanted?

This encounter between past and present also extends to the way Mohaiemen draws on Raihan’s own cinematic language. A Missing Can of Film begins with a girl working a dheki, the traditional wooden rice-pounding device, its rhythmic thudding establishing the film’s opening soundscape. It recalls Stop Genocide, whose most striking device is the punctuation-like use of “STOP” as in the telegram. In Raihan’s film, the word lands like a command, almost a call to action, interrupting the flow of images and freezing them in place; at the same time, it becomes a literal demand to stop the atrocities being shown.

Stop Genocide is also striking in the way Raihan frames people. Faces come right up to the lens, often pushed to the edge of the frame, while tents, camps and other figures remain visible behind them. There is something starkly Soviet in these compositions. Bangladeshi film critic and author Mahmudul Hossain, in The Other National Cinema of Bangladesh (2023), argues that Raihan drew on Third Cinema’s use of documentary footage, newsreels, photographs and statistics.

There is a playfulness to the film even amid the horror, making Stop Genocide an exciting piece of agitprop cinema. Mohaiemen picks up that impulse, allowing images to halt, collide and fracture. He even credits Raihan for screenplay and direction and the original cinematographers for their work, treating the footage as authored material, with its own rhythms, choices and visual logic.

There was also a deliberate international address in Stop Genocide. It was an attempt to expose the Pakistan army’s atrocities in East Pakistan, invoking Auschwitz, Vietnam, Algeria and Palestine. Its narration by fellow filmmaker Alamgir Kabir, whose voice Mohaiemen retains in his own film, reinforces that outward-facing attitude. As film scholar Mainak Biswas said at the opening of the Experimenter exhibition, Stop Genocide “remains a crucial film in a history of solidarity networks among political filmmakers across national boundaries.”

That internationalism finds an echo in the exhibition. Alongside A Missing Can of Film are Jamahiriya Means People: Okba Ibn Naafa, a series of prints inspired by Mohaiemen’s father’s years in Libya in the 1970s, and Karen’s Last Books: Ibsen to Nguyen, which recreates the final reading list of his friend Karen Wentworth through drawings of book covers, excerpts and recorded conversations.

The works move between mediums, countries and decades. Prateek and Priyanka Raja, co-founders and directors of Experimenter, say that “Mohaiemen works on projects that straddle wide arcs of time, that go deep into archives, and scratch beneath the layers of what is apparent and remembered.” They add that “what is striking is his ability to catch the undertones of history, and to find patterns, slippages, and omissions through which these histories have been narrated, retold, archived, and restaged.”

Mohaiemen’s wider body of work has earned him considerable international recognition, including a 2018 Turner Prize nomination for Tripoli Cancelled and Two Meetings and a Funeral. The latter traces the fractures within the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1970s; Tripoli Cancelled turns a family story of migration into a fictional account of a man stranded in an abandoned airport. Both return, like A Missing Can of Film, to political possibilities that did not quite survive their moment.

There is a sly moment in which Mohaiemen’s camera moves through the stairs of BFDC, past a portrait of Raihan and then one of Satyajit Ray. In its gallery of Bengali filmmaking greats, the BFDC has decided to pair Raihan and Ray by keeping their portraits close to each other, but Mohaiemen doesn’t agree to this coupling. He slaps a text on screen, in large red letters: “Angry Ritwik Ghatak would be”. Followed by “A better fit in spirit of Raihan”. There are things in Raihan’s films that recall Ghatak: those canted, humid, psychologically charged closeups; the harsh melodrama. But the kinship isn’t just stylistic. Ghatak, whose cinema was profoundly marked by Partition and displacement, opens up a different lineage for Raihan—connecting him to filmmakers who saw cinema as a way of engaging with the upheavals of their time.

The title of the exhibition, Raihan-Ghatak-Tarkovsky, takes this idea further. As Mohaiemen told India Today: “Tarkovsky occupies a certain Cinema of Praxis position within our film schools, and you can see some of those influences in Raihan’s angles and shots.” The trio, he adds, “pointed to a possible other film history from the global periphery.” The title also draws on Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s book, John-Ghatak-Tarkovsky: Citizens, Filmmakers, Hackers, which itself emerged from the 2015 FTII student protests and their invocation of Eisenstein and Pudovkin. The students’ chant—“Eisenstein, Pudovkin/We shall fight, we shall win”—has a particular resonance here: Mohaiemen’s Daily Star essay on Raihan is titled We shall search, we shall find.

Mohaiemen does not recover the lost film, or settle the mystery of Raihan’s disappearance. He retrieves what remains around that absence—images, sounds, gestures, traces of a cinema that was cut short—and puts them back into circulation.

Zico Ghosh is a journalist based in Kolkata.

Raihan-Ghatak-Tarkovsky is on at Experimenter, Hindustan road, Kolkata, until 10 October.

Forty-five days after Bangladesh became independent in December 1971, Zahir Raihan, one of the key figures of Bengali cinema from the region, went missing at the age of 36. He had gone looking for his brother, a writer, who had disappeared during the war. Raihan is suspected to have been abducted and killed, presumably by the Pakistan army.

That’s the narrative that visual artist and writer Naeem Mohaiemen, 57, says he grew up hearing—even though that did not make sense: how could the Pakistan army operate in a newly independent Bangladesh, let alone murder a prominent figure like Raihan? It’s only in the last 15 years or so that Mohaiemen, who’s based in New York and Dhaka, started to learn about a missing can of film. A film Raihan had made that apparently held secrets that could “embarrass the war command” of the newly formed state. It got Mohaiemen, whose practice has been described as an investigation of “failed leftist utopias and incomplete decolonisations”, interested.

Raihan’s political commitments were deeper than his filmography might suggest—he made about a dozen films and wrote eight novels. He had been a member of the Communist Party for years, even as he built a successful career making popular cinema: family dramas and entertainers, including Pakistan’s first colour film, Sangam (1964), in Urdu. It was only towards the end of his life that the politics became impossible to separate from the filmmaking.

Jibon Theke Neya (1970), a domestic melodrama that doubled as an allegory of East Pakistan, marked the turn. During the Liberation War, Raihan moved to Kolkata and became part of the cultural front of the independence movement, making the 20-minute documentary, Stop Genocide, his masterpiece and a landmark political film of the war. He was also involved in several other films during this period, including the unfinished Let There Be Light, which was described as an “ode to human suffering through the ages”, and the film whose supposed existence gives Mohaiemen’s project, its title.

It is this brief, volatile phase that Mohaiemen is after in his video installation A Missing Can of Film (2025). “I wanted to trace the genealogy of Raihan’s brief, liminal socialist cinema,” he wrote in an essay in February this year for The Daily Star, “or what I call the ‘Socialist Stillborn’ formed under the crucible of a liberation war in which the communist parties were not allowed a central role.” A Missing Can of Film reflects on this unfinished history and the idea of revolution, while attempting to enter his unrealised cinema through the films he left behind. The film is part of Mohaiemen’s exhibition Raihan-Ghatak-Tarkovsky, on at Experimenter, Hindustan road, Kolkata, until 10 October.

Mohaiemen traces that unrealised cinema largely through Raihan’s own images. Archival footage from across his filmography is cut together in unexpected combinations: a scene from one of his Urdu films converses with one from a Bengali film; songs, dances, faces and bodies recur across different films and different registers. There are split-screens, with images playing simultaneously; sometimes one panel goes black while the others continue.

It becomes a sensory trip through an archive, with Mohaiemen making Raihan’s films speak to one another rather than simply illustrating his story. “In Missing Can I search for Zahir Raihan within his own film archive,” he writes. The language of the film is fluid: archival footage, contemporary images, scraps of sound and text that sometimes resembles inter-titles are spliced together into a shifting tapestry. Visual and aural echoes travel between Raihan’s films and the images Mohaiemen has shot himself.

Those contemporary images come from the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation (BFDC), filmed in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 student uprising. Rusting equipment, empty spaces, machines and corridors acquire an eerie quality. Mohaiemen lingers over them, allowing the BFDC to become a site from where one political moment contemplates another. In red letters, the film asks: Is this the nation they wanted?

This encounter between past and present also extends to the way Mohaiemen draws on Raihan’s own cinematic language. A Missing Can of Film begins with a girl working a dheki, the traditional wooden rice-pounding device, its rhythmic thudding establishing the film’s opening soundscape. It recalls Stop Genocide, whose most striking device is the punctuation-like use of “STOP” as in the telegram. In Raihan’s film, the word lands like a command, almost a call to action, interrupting the flow of images and freezing them in place; at the same time, it becomes a literal demand to stop the atrocities being shown.

Stop Genocide is also striking in the way Raihan frames people. Faces come right up to the lens, often pushed to the edge of the frame, while tents, camps and other figures remain visible behind them. There is something starkly Soviet in these compositions. Bangladeshi film critic and author Mahmudul Hossain, in The Other National Cinema of Bangladesh (2023), argues that Raihan drew on Third Cinema’s use of documentary footage, newsreels, photographs and statistics.

There is a playfulness to the film even amid the horror, making Stop Genocide an exciting piece of agitprop cinema. Mohaiemen picks up that impulse, allowing images to halt, collide and fracture. He even credits Raihan for screenplay and direction and the original cinematographers for their work, treating the footage as authored material, with its own rhythms, choices and visual logic.

There was also a deliberate international address in Stop Genocide. It was an attempt to expose the Pakistan army’s atrocities in East Pakistan, invoking Auschwitz, Vietnam, Algeria and Palestine. Its narration by fellow filmmaker Alamgir Kabir, whose voice Mohaiemen retains in his own film, reinforces that outward-facing attitude. As film scholar Mainak Biswas said at the opening of the Experimenter exhibition, Stop Genocide “remains a crucial film in a history of solidarity networks among political filmmakers across national boundaries.”

That internationalism finds an echo in the exhibition. Alongside A Missing Can of Film are Jamahiriya Means People: Okba Ibn Naafa, a series of prints inspired by Mohaiemen’s father’s years in Libya in the 1970s, and Karen’s Last Books: Ibsen to Nguyen, which recreates the final reading list of his friend Karen Wentworth through drawings of book covers, excerpts and recorded conversations.

The works move between mediums, countries and decades. Prateek and Priyanka Raja, co-founders and directors of Experimenter, say that “Mohaiemen works on projects that straddle wide arcs of time, that go deep into archives, and scratch beneath the layers of what is apparent and remembered.” They add that “what is striking is his ability to catch the undertones of history, and to find patterns, slippages, and omissions through which these histories have been narrated, retold, archived, and restaged.”

Mohaiemen’s wider body of work has earned him considerable international recognition, including a 2018 Turner Prize nomination for Tripoli Cancelled and Two Meetings and a Funeral. The latter traces the fractures within the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1970s; Tripoli Cancelled turns a family story of migration into a fictional account of a man stranded in an abandoned airport. Both return, like A Missing Can of Film, to political possibilities that did not quite survive their moment.

There is a sly moment in which Mohaiemen’s camera moves through the stairs of BFDC, past a portrait of Raihan and then one of Satyajit Ray. In its gallery of Bengali filmmaking greats, the BFDC has decided to pair Raihan and Ray by keeping their portraits close to each other, but Mohaiemen doesn’t agree to this coupling. He slaps a text on screen, in large red letters: “Angry Ritwik Ghatak would be”. Followed by “A better fit in spirit of Raihan”. There are things in Raihan’s films that recall Ghatak: those canted, humid, psychologically charged closeups; the harsh melodrama. But the kinship isn’t just stylistic. Ghatak, whose cinema was profoundly marked by Partition and displacement, opens up a different lineage for Raihan—connecting him to filmmakers who saw cinema as a way of engaging with the upheavals of their time.

The title of the exhibition, Raihan-Ghatak-Tarkovsky, takes this idea further. As Mohaiemen told India Today: “Tarkovsky occupies a certain Cinema of Praxis position within our film schools, and you can see some of those influences in Raihan’s angles and shots.” The trio, he adds, “pointed to a possible other film history from the global periphery.” The title also draws on Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s book, John-Ghatak-Tarkovsky: Citizens, Filmmakers, Hackers, which itself emerged from the 2015 FTII student protests and their invocation of Eisenstein and Pudovkin. The students’ chant—“Eisenstein, Pudovkin/We shall fight, we shall win”—has a particular resonance here: Mohaiemen’s Daily Star essay on Raihan is titled We shall search, we shall find.

Mohaiemen does not recover the lost film, or settle the mystery of Raihan’s disappearance. He retrieves what remains around that absence—images, sounds, gestures, traces of a cinema that was cut short—and puts them back into circulation.

Zico Ghosh is a journalist based in Kolkata.

Raihan-Ghatak-Tarkovsky is on at Experimenter, Hindustan road, Kolkata, until 10 October.