• Fri 27 10 2017 / 9 pm •
Last Man in Dhaka Central Naeem Mohaiemen

with NAEEM MOHAIEMEN

Last Man in Dhaka Central, 82', Bangladesh/Netherlands/USA, 2015, in English, Dutch, and Bengali with English subtitles

Last Man in Dhaka Central is the third in a series of Naeem Mohaiemen’s films investigating the role of misrecognition in the collapse of leftist insurgencies in the 1970s postcolonial world. Inspired by Herbert Marcuse’s theories, Dutch academic Peter Custers left his PhD studies at Johns Hopkins University (USA) to move to Bangladesh in 1973 in search of a “more authentic” revolutionary socialism. Ricocheting between nonalignment, state socialism, and underground Maoist uprisings, all of the country’s left tomorrows collapsed in the bloody military coups of 1975. Caught in the maelstrom was Custers, arrested on charges of anti-state conspiracy. But a European would never be executed in that jail, and so it was that Peter Custers was the last man at the edge of one history, a conflicted memoirist of the wreckage of hope. He died unexpectedly a month before he was to attend the film’s festival premiere. It is now an unintentional memorial, embodying regrets for Peter Custers. The film is introduced by Academy fellow and theorist RENAN LARU-AN.

Venue: Alte Feuerwache, Melchiorstraße 3, 50670 Cologne
Free admission

Further events on 27 10: Vivek Chibber (lecture) and Perverse Decolonization (panel discussion)