Nothing has been as persistent as the universal sense of grief we have experienced over the last few years. A grief that cannot be pushed away or remade into fuel for something else and whose collective nature ensures no escape. Two films by the promising visual artist Leena Habiballa transform this affect into a historical and political question, grounding it in a genealogy and ecology of social relations. By utilising collective memory and a spectral aesthetic, Habiballa’s work creates alternative sensory experiences of war and colonialism that do not relish in images of suffering but that mine the image and the archive for other languages and imaginations. Mourning for Habiballa is thus visualized as a parsing through the accumulated pasts in the present and the re-narration of our histories beyond the frame of a colonial imagination.
The frame in Leena Habiballa’s short film Do Not Dream of a Wonderful World acts as a mirror into the psyche of the young woman at its center. In a static medium shot, the only constant is the unnamed woman, traumatized as she faces her academic advisers. They berate her for submitting her dissertation late while simultaneously offering hollow consolation for the genocide in her homeland, Sudan. In the background, the brutal war manifests through fleeting images of soldiers, weapons, and anguished civilians. This simple premise hints at the inescapable trauma Sudanese people endure everyday, even those physically distant but mentally trapped in the horrors of the war.
In Dead as a Dodo, another moving image work, Habiballa unravels the myth of the dodo’s extinction, exposing how settler colonialism dictates whose stories are remembered and whose are buried. The dodo was a flightless bird native to Mauritius. It became extinct in the late 1600s due to hunting and habitat destruction. Through haunting archival imagery and an evocative soundscape, Habiballa invites the audience to confront how colonial narratives might shape their understanding of history.
Dead as a Dodo brilliantly teases out the relationship between language and power. Through the film’s narration, Habiballa subverts colonial epistemologies that define reality in order to dominate and possess it. The editing and voice over beautifully shuffle and remake subject-object power relationships, inviting a spectral play with the ghost of the dodo and a re-enactment of history or experience of memory outside of a colonial psychology.
Across both films, Leena Habiballa crafts a political and poetic cinematic language, where personal and collective grief are inseparable from the forces of colonialism and war. Whether dissecting the historical erasure of the dodo through inventive use of archives or exposing the psychological toll of Sudan’s ongoing genocide, her work insists on bearing witness to suppressed narratives. Her visual work is grounded with simple methodology, no frills, just the bare facts. Whether using archival photos and documents in Dead as a Dodo or the one shot in Do Not Dream of a Wonderful World there is a restraint that brings the storytelling to the forefront putting the audience in intimate connection with the narrative. The filmmaking is so confident that it forces the question of what she can do with a bigger canvas and more resources. In these two short films, Habiballa manages to artistically challenge dominant narratives while creating space for the resilience and grief of those rendered invisible by history’s selective memory. Imagine what she could do if she had an hour or two.
Murtada Elfadl is a culture writer, critic, and film curator. Originally from Khartoum, Sudan he’s currently based in New York. His writing has been published at Variety, The A.V. Club, and Backstage Magazine, among other publications.