House of History

House of History screens at the Schwarzman Centre on Saturday 24 October, as part of a wider programme called Afghanistan Reframed. It's a 1996 documentary compiled by filmmaker Qadir Taheri, and it's described as a stark record of the devastation of Kabul and Afghanistan's cultural heritage at the height of the Afghan Civil War. The film is in Dari with English subtitles, so you'll be watching it in its original language.

After the screening, there's a conversation and presentation on Afghan guerilla films by Barry Sadid of the Afghan Visual Arts and History (AVAH) collective, which includes excerpts from The Passage (Hossein Danesh, 1997). It's not just a one-off screening, then — the film is the starting point for a wider look at how Afghan filmmakers have worked under pressure.

That context comes from Afghanistan Reframed, a screening day curated by Dr Chihab El Khachab, Associate Professor in Visual Anthropology and Fellow of Wolfson College, and by filmmaker and curator Parwana Haydar of AVAH. The collective was founded in 2019 by Afghan artists and artworkers to research, contextualise and share the country's visual arts. The whole programme brings together rarely seen films from Afghanistan's cinematic archive alongside contemporary works, looking at the country through the eyes of its filmmakers at home and across the diaspora.

The day is hosted at the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, an interdisciplinary hub that opened at the University of Oxford in 2019. It brings together seven humanities faculties and research institutes, with libraries, collections, exhibitions and performance spaces open to the public. House of History runs from 12:00 to 13:00 at the Oxford Cinema within the centre. Entry is free, though you'll need to book your tickets in advance.