On a Wing and a Prayer

Director: Alia Syed

Year: 2025

In this South Asian team sport, players repeating ‘kabaddi’ frantically cross boundaries on the court, tagging their opponents before returning. Ka ba Ddi is a high-energy team sport originating in South Asia played between two teams of seven players on a divided court. Players respond to boundaries, bodies think in relation to each other: lines of the court, focal points for players movements. Stretching back into their own territory; a vocabulary of movement that make connections with what is happening in the wider world, in domestic UK politics but also internationally. Territory has never felt so terrifying or so contested. The rules based order of Kabaddi stipulates that one team sends a single "raider" into the opposing team's territory, the aim is to tag/touch as many players as possible from the opposing side before retreating back into your own territory. Rules govern our bodies, we live in a series of ever increasing courts both materially and ideologically. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Short Film Competition

Director: Alia Syed

Year: 2004

A poetic and compelling 16mm film shot in London, Karachi and Lahore which encompasses five stories relating to the times of day for Muslim prayer. The work explores overlaps between time, memory and location. Connecting different places and people through images and sounds, Eating Grass contains documentary footage accompanied by a voiceover in both Urdu and English. The textures of individual voices continually slip from one language to another, creating and repeating rhythms. Meaning is not only conveyed by what is said but also by building tonal rhythmical cadences, similar musical structures to those found in jazz or Indian classical music.

Director: Anna Maguire, Kyle Greenberg

Year: 2026

What if you went on a holiday and the apocalypse happened? GALICIA! is a found-footage, hybrid-documentary following a couple through home video footage as they visit their friends at a winery in rural Spain and inadvertently capture the end of days. We live in a time where the sense of our impending mutually assured destruction is more real than it’s ever been. GALICIA! Takes the form of a holiday video - a document of a couple before - and after the great cataclysm. The film starts as something that feels unedited - an accidental video diary of an ordinary couple that feels somewhat ghostly as much as it is also pedestrian. As the film evolves and degrades, we are led to question the fragility of humanity, as well as its power to endure.