Song for an ancient land

A composition in four parts that forms the backbone of a work on some of the recessive strains of this soil, like the inheritance of difference and Hindu Muslim relations, the place of action or karma, a backbone that not only is formed by the soil but also hopefully forms it; the shooting and editing process, often a question, a discovery, a tribute, or a celebration of that intersection of soil and self, purity of metal, made stronger by contamination and dirt. A filmmaker and video artist Kabir Mohanty has spent three decades finding his place between the ensemble form that is cinema with a film director at its core, and the solo practitioner that is often the video artist.

Song for an Ancient Land, in an earlier version, has been shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, and at the Kochi Muiziris Biennale.

Mohanty’s sound installation, In Memory, 2009, 2012 is part of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Permanent Collection. His most recent work is An Offer from the Desert, a sound installation, commissioned for the 2024-25 Abu Dhabi Biennale.

Song Baithak 

A conversation with Amrit Gangar

G5A and Kabir Mohanty are delighted to welcome Amrit Gangar—who, for nearly two transformative decades, shaped the vision of Screen Unit, that legendary film society from Bombay’s luminous past—to lead this session. Screen Unit was never just about screening films; it was a living ecosystem: books being written and passed hand to hand, spirited addas that stretched late into the night, ideas exchanged with urgency, and cinema spilling into life and the city beyond the theatre walls. That spirit—bold, questioning, uncontained—still endures.

Those multi-paged, foolscap-sized mimeographed notes made for each program refused boundaries: film and life, film and public parks, film and the trains—everything was in conversation. We remember that time with exhilaration, with the feeling that cinema could transform how we breathe and look and move in the world.

In that same spirit, this program becomes a dialogue—with Amrit Gangar—about Song for an ancient land, about cinema’s infinite resonances, and about everything that lies just outside it.

Present at the session will be Setu, cinematographer; Mohandas VP, sound; Vikram Joglekar, sound; Sruti Visweswaran, editing associate, directorial assistant; Samimitra Das, directorial assistant; Ravindra Sahu, actor, and Kabir Mohanty.

Schedule

Friday, November 21, 2025

17:00 – Song for an ancient land

Saturday, November 22, 2025

17:00 – Song for an ancient land

Sunday, November 23, 2025

15:00 – Song for an ancient land

20:00 – Song Baithak a conversation with Amrit Ganger