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notnajjrin

@notnajjrin

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Film programmer and writer for hire with words on Sight and Sound, Time Out, ArtReview Asia, ASAP Connect, Momus, and more. Email/DM me for work ⬇️

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Photos from @loveliff 2026 screenings: Too Desi Too Queer at ICA; LAGAAN at IMAX - with Aamir Khan and British cast members; Britain Through South Asian Eyes shorts programme at Genesis - with filmmakers including legendary Alia Syed; and Aamir Khan in conversation at BFI Southbank.

Yes: THE Aamir Khan 🤩 It’s not every day we get to see one of the biggest film stars of all time and, in my opinion, the most important hyphenate film star of the 2000s-2010s. LAGAAN has never been my favourite Aamir Khan film, but it holds up SO well. Those 224 mins didn’t drag - popular Hindi cinema storytelling at its best.
Lots of interesting things in the BFI conversation, including his perspective on what we now call the Bollywood era, and the rowdiest audience Q&A ever! Slightly disturbing: Aamir Khan doesn’t watch films.

Alongside some lovely catch ups and Aamir Khan, film highlights included the shorts TARA (@lotusvisualpro), CUPBOARD PICKLE, AFTER EIGHT: THE STORY OF SATPAL RAM (@mos.hannan) and Darshan Gajjar’s wonderful tribute to his grandfather SHOP DADA 👏🏾

Thank you @caryrajinder @krushilcooks @notnajjrin 👏🏾✨👏🏾✨

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New text! “Impassable Gates” by Najrin Islam (@notnajjrin) on Laura Vandewynckel’s 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘦.

“It is an interesting choice for the filmmaker to have colour-coded the humans in this animation, while also rendering them in the mould of Javanese shadow puppets. Called Wayang, these puppets are traditionally made of sticks derived from buffalo skin; here, they are a three-dimensional textile iteration. The effect is both funny and unsettling: the white man is literally rendered white while the coloured people are painted yellow—in a rather blunt indication of their racial distinction.” — Najrin Islam

Read the full text via yanco.be.

[▶︎] 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘦 is available to stream globally via yanco! Subscribe for €30 and get one-year access to the 75+ films in our streaming library.
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#paradise #migration #bordercontrol @lauravandewynckel

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Najrin Islam’s curated film programme Tender Guerrillas: Self-Filming and Queer Becomings—held at the University College London East Community Cinema on 02 May 2026—foregrounds self-filming as a radical mode of queer image-making in South Asia.

In this essay, Pramodha Weerasekera reflects on films by Srishti Sharma, Tejal Shah, Maya.nk, Nishit Saran and Riyad Vinci Wadia, tracing self-documentation as an act of tenderness, resistance and self-determination. Revisiting works made across different historical moments, the essay considers how queer filmmakers reclaim the authority to narrate their own lives through intimacy, memory and desire.

Read the full essay on the ASAP | art app and website. Link in bio!

The editorial work at ASAP | art is supported by The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.

Image Credits: Still from Maya.nk’s Boudinet’s Curtain (2024); Still from Tejal Shah’s There is a Spider Living Between Us (2009).

Keywords: Analogue, Moving Images / Film, Archive / Collection, Gender, Personal Narratives, Resistance

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Meet the facilitators for the Arts Journalism Grant 2026!

Four selected writers will get an opportunity to attend sessions and workshops from experts in the field to develop a piece of reportage around artists, creative communities and practices across India, from first draft to publication.

Structured workshops, editorial guidance, and a grant of INR 25,000 each.

Applications close 9 July. Apply via the link in bio!

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East London, Bangladesh, and the geographies of resistance travelling through 🎞️
DIZI takes a look at Najrin Islam's programme for the London Short Film Festival, East London, Bangladesh and Tales of Becoming — tracing the Bangladeshi diaspora's fight for safety and dignity in 1970s Brick Lane alongside Bangladesh's own postcolonial coming-of-age in the same decade.
Archival footage from the Rainbow Collective and Four Corners Archive sits beside contemporary films by Munem Wasif, Mehedi Mostafa, and Sarker Protick — two timelines, one inheritance.
Link in bio 🔗
#LondonShortFilmFestival #BangladeshiDiaspora #BrickLane #FilmCuration #DiasporaStories

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A huge thank you to everyone who contributed and joined us! You made the 11th Eye International Conference a truly unforgettable experience!
We hope to see you soon!

Photos by Fidel Enciso and Alex Sirotenko

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🗺️ NEW on yanco: Laura Vandewynckel’s 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘦 [𝘏𝘦𝘵 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘫𝘴] + Oksana Luyssen & Ysé Auguste-Dormeuil’s 3723 𝘒𝘔 𝘈𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘳𝘰𝘸 𝘍𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘴—a double-bill of short films that questions the colonial legacies that drive modern migration. Curated by Najrin Islam.

In Vandewynckel’s award-winning 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘦 (2014), digital renditions of Javanese shadow puppets illustrate how mobility privilege works. While Luyssen & Auguste-Dormeuil’s work zooms into biometric facial recognition—the Greek government’s essential requisite for migrants trying to obtain residence permits.

Despite being released ten years apart, both Belgian productions share a restlessness in the face of injustice and, from different vantage points, offer an image of distinct bureaucratic apparatuses as bodies traverse them.

An essay (NL+EN) by Najrin Islam on 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘦 is also published in yanco’s magazine.

[▶︎] This double-bill #32 is available to stream worldwide via yanco.be. Subscribe for €30 and get one-year access to the 70+ films in our streaming library.
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#shortfilm #shortfilms #migration #bordercontrol @lauravandewynckel @xiouchaa @notnajjrin @insasbe @ritcs.school.of.arts @cinemadedemain

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#NowStreaming 🇵🇸 UNDR by Kamal Aljafari.

“This essay film employs a range of archival perspectives to look at Palestinian land and its peoples through history. As helicopter footage reveals an austere gaze on natural land and people engaged in their daily occupations, one is reminded of the unrelenting state of aerial surveillance that Palestinians continue to live under. As children play hide-and-seek, the footage records the erosion of the land caused by frequent detonations. The film is as much a sombre meditation as a witness to the irreversible changes brought on by imperial acts of control.”

— Najrin Islam & Cindy Chehab

This short film is part of “Mapping Absentia”, curated by Najrin Islam and Cindy Chehab, included in “Siesmic Shifts” — a cohort of three programs developed within the European Workshop for New Curators #2. This collection was curated by the participants Alexandra Sirotenko, Cindy Chehab, Mai Nguyen, Najrin Islam, Raouf Moussa, and Tania Hernández González, under the mentorshop of Daniella Shreir, during the 2025 editions of Lago Film Fest and Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (BIEFF).

The European Workshop for New Curators #2 is a project by the European Network for Film Discourse (The END) and Talking Shorts, funded by the Creative Europe MEDIA Programme.

Now streaming at thisisshort.com.

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🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 Come to @queereast to see Tender Guerrillas: Self-Filming and Queer Becomings for a screening of a selection queer Indian films made from 1996-2024.

Then stay and join Sharan Dhaliwal for a conversation about queer film making 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

Curated by the amazing @notnajjrin 🙏🏽 who made sure the films were all queer-created.

1. BOMgAY | English, 1996
Dir. Riyad Vinci Wadia
Often cited as India’s first openly queer film, BOMgAY uses an anthology format to uncover queer life embedded within the dense textures of Bombay.

2. Boudinet’s Curtain | English, Hindi (with Eng subs), 2024
Dir. Mayank Agarwal
Using Roland Barthe’s reflections on the indexical value of a photograph, the filmmaker conducts interviews with queer individuals whose testimonies are juxtaposed with their respective childhood photographs.

3. Chhoti Baatein / Little Things | Hindi (with Eng subs), 2024
Dir. Srishti Sharma
The documentary follows the filmmaker as they travel to their Indian parents in a conservative city, and musters the courage to explain to them how gendered expectations have weighed on them since childhood.

4. There Is A Spider Living Between Us | English, 2008
Dir. Tejal Shah
The artist employs a range of modes - photography, animation, and collage - to explore female sexuality and desire, creating a fantastical string of images.

5. Summer In My Veins | English, 1999
Dir. Nishit Saran
A gay Indian filmmaker travels across America with his family who is visiting from India. He was tested for HIV before he left for the trip and will not receive his results until they return.

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In this edition of Writer’s Pick—a segment where ASAP | art invites its writers to revisit the archive and curate selections that continue to resonate—Annalisa Mansukhani brings together pieces that foreground cinema as a site of resistance, surrealism as a method for understanding the latent possibilities of form, and the politics of temporality.

To read the pieces, click on the link in our bio!

The editorial work at ASAP | art is supported by The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts

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Writer’s Pick is a new segment where ASAP | art invites its writers to revisit the archive and curate selections that continue to resonate.

In this edition, Sucheta Chakraborty brings together selections from the archive that explore the interplay between still and moving images, as well as nostalgia and futurism.

To read the pieces, click on the link in our bio!

The editorial work at ASAP | art is supported by The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.

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What happens when one turns the camera inward, only to find others already there?

𝙏𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙧 𝙂𝙪𝙚𝙧𝙧𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙖𝙨 comprises a set of fiercely intimate and formally restless films from India that linger on the contradictions of queer image-making through self-filming. Made between 1996 and 2024 using modest means and improvised methods, these works hold space for difficult conversations with parents, perusing queer childhoods in photo albums and unveiling the quiet pressures of kinship and expectation.

This screening will be followed by a conversation with Sharan Dhaliwal @sharandhaliwal_, author and Founder of Burnt Roti.

Guest curated by Najrin Islam @notnajjrin

Sat 2 May 18:30 at UCL East Community Cinema, with our friends at @spectra.queernonfiction

🍳 𝘽𝙊𝙈𝙜𝘼𝙔 | dir. Riyad Vinci Wadia | 1996 | 11 min

🖼️ 𝘽𝙤𝙪𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙩’𝙨 𝘾𝙪𝙧𝙩𝙖𝙞𝙣 | dir. Maya.nk @queerchildhoods | 2024 | 27 min

🎞️ 𝙇𝙞𝙩𝙩𝙡𝙚 𝙏𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙨 | dir. Srishti Sharma @ssrishti98 | 2024 | 19 min

🕷️ 𝙏𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚 𝙞𝙨 𝙖 𝙎𝙥𝙞𝙙𝙚𝙧 𝙇𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝘽𝙚𝙩𝙬𝙚𝙚𝙣 𝙐𝙨 | dir. Tejal Shah | 2009 | 7 min

📹 𝙎𝙪𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙧 𝙞𝙣 𝙈𝙮 𝙑𝙚𝙞𝙣𝙨 | dir. Nish Saran | 1999 | 40 min

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