SFP Montage at NYU Abu Dhabi

Sharjah Film Platform Montage (SFP Montage) is an initiative that builds on Sharjah Art Foundation’s annual film festival through special projects and curated programmes. By presenting films from past editions of Sharjah Film Platform outside Sharjah, the Foundation seeks to develop new audiences and new connections between the works. As part of this effort, the awarded films of SFP7 will be screened at NYUAD: The Screening Room.

The first film featured in this series is the documentary short Surveilling a Crime Scene (2023), which exposes the ongoing impact of colonisation in Miriwoong Country, Australia, revealing how power and violence persist through institutions, landscapes and daily life. Also being screened is the documentary feature Coconut Head Generation (2023), in which Nigerian university students transform their film club into a space for political and intellectual resistance, challenging stereotypes about their generation while reclaiming their right to critical thought.  

The fiction films in this programme are Upshot (2024), a short depicting an isolated couple grappling with their children’s life choices after personal tragedy, and the feature film Cu Li Không Bao Giờ Khóc (Cu Li Never Cries) (2024), in which the protagonist confronts the ghosts of her past while worrying that her niece is repeating the same life mistakes.

Organised by Sharjah Art Foundation in collaboration with the Arts Center and the Film and New Media Program at NYU Abu Dhabi, the programme is scheduled to run at The Screening Room on 3 and 4 May 2025.

Screening and Booking Information:

3 May
7:00 pm

Surveilling a Crime Scene (2023)
Director: Alana Hunt
Australia
Documentary | 22 minutes
English with Arabic subtitles

Shot on Super 8mm film, Surveilling a Crime Scene examines the lives of non-Indigenous people in Miriwoong Country, northwest Australia, to frame colonisation as not only a historical phenomenon but also a continuous and present violence. Weaving connections between various subjects—a dam, a historical monument, agriculture, tourism, a police station, tortured bodies and bureaucracy—the film lays bare the tools and techniques of power and oppression.

Coconut Head Generation (2023)
Director: Alain Kassanda
France, Nigeria
Documentary | 89 minutes
English, Pidgin, Yoruba and French with Arabic subtitles

Every Thursday, a group of students from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria organises a film club, transforming a small lecture hall into a political assembly. Reclaiming the expression ‘coconut head generation’—a derisive term for stubborn and brainless youth—the students assert their right to intellectual freedom while honing their critical voice.

4 May
7:00 pm

Upshot (2024) 
Director: Maha Haj
Palestine, Italy, France
Fiction | 34 minutes
Arabic with English subtitles

After suffering unimaginable loss, Suleiman and Lubna retreat to an isolated farm, where they tend to their crops and engage in impassioned debates about their five children’s life choices. One day a stranger arrives to reveal a harrowing truth from their past.

Cu Li Không Bao Giờ Khóc (Cu Li Never Cries) (2024)
Director: Phạm Ngọc Lân
Vietnam, Singapore, France, Philippines, Norway
Fiction | 92 minutes
Vietnamese with Arabic and English subtitles 

After picking up the ashes of her estranged husband from Germany, Mrs Nguyen travels back to Hanoi with Cu Li, his pet pygmy slow loris, a primate native to the Vietnamese rainforest. Upon her return, she finds her pregnant niece rushing into marriage and fears the young woman is making the same mistakes that she did. The film weaves together the present moment with the complex echoes of Vietnamese history by interspersing the old woman’s longing for the past with the couple’s uncertain future.

These film screenings are open to the public, and tickets are free.