Jean Genet is Dead

Director: Sadia Pineda Hameed

Year: 2020

THE SONG OF MY LIFE takes its audio-visual style from pop karaoke videos, 1970s melodramas and ballads. It is a duet of absences, marked by a missing vocal partner and gaps in the backing track, which comes from a 1971 easy-listening song of the same name by Filipino actress and singer Nora Aunor. Atmospheric and dreamlike, the film weaves together mesmerising images filmed by the artist - light hitting water, waves on the sea, illuminated flowers - with found footage of crushed cars and a TV romance. These visuals shift our attention between what we hear, what we read, what the artist tells us, what her mother cannot directly say, and the silences in between; interested in the gaps in the telling of stories, what she calls the “quiet and misunderstood spaces” where secrets within a family may be sensed or implied. The need to look for meaning in hidden or alternative spaces also arises from living under colonialism, where estrangement between generations is also the consequence of this. Abundant with clues and coded references, THE SONG OF MY LIFE is like experiencing the retelling of a story - each return unearthing more than before.

Director: Sadia Pineda Hameed

Year: 2026

ANAK WHERE DID WE STAY? is a five-channel film by Sadia Pineda Hameed that brings together The Box’s home movie collection and the artist’s personal/family collection. Rasheed Araeen’s chakras, spouting waves, Beatlesmania, a basking shark, hula dance, an Enoch Powell protest, tidal islands and seafoam floating into the air—the archives converge across time to tell the story of the artist’s mother’s migration from one archipelago to another: the Philippines to the British Isles. The film becomes a gathering site for personal and collective experiences of journeys, resilience and belonging. Road trips unexpectedly reenact the archive, footage finds itself out of context, voices commentate the film as if rewatching a home movie together; mimesis, associations and autonomy are central to the retelling. As camcorders became more accessible from the 1970s onwards, home movies were an unconscious means to rebuild personal archives after colonial displacement, extraction and erasure. ANAK WHERE DID WE STAY?, named after the home movie from The Box’s archive 'Perranporth Where Did We Stay?', unfolds as a conversation between the artist and her mother, exploring the three interconnected journeys of migration, holidays and remembering. Produced as part of The Box’s Reimagining the Film Archive programme (BFI Screen Heritage Fund).

Director: Sadia Pineda Hameed

Year: 2025

MOVING SOUND is a speculative work set across 1980s and near-future Wales, shot on super 16mm. In the film, sounds of present day anti-colonial and anti-capitalist strategies for mining strikes are transmitted from Soundcamp streamboxes to the past via an underground, time travelling broadcast. In the 1980s, workers build DIY receivers from Moving Sound portable audio devices, which they use to distribute the broadcast around sites of production and the everyday. First screened in the King Coal Experience (an immersive recreation of the Big Pit underground mine) amidst disused mining machinery, MOVING SOUND blurs fictional 16mm and archival 8mm footage of sonic action to explore how organising converges and enacts across geographies, temporality, fantasy and reality.