Pashto Naqloona: A dying heritage (Dr. Mateeullah Tareen, IAAW)
Summary: This initiative focuses on gathering and documenting Pashto Naqloona, the traditional bedtime tales passed down in rural Pashtun communities of north-western Balochistan, Pakistan. These narratives are rich in folklore, legends, and elements of historical significance, typically told by mothers and grandmothers to their children. In a time of smartphones and shifting cultural practices, the project aims to build a digital archive of Naqloona with English translations or subtitles, adhering to data protection protocols. The primary audience is women aged 60 and above, with the goal of safeguarding the oral storytelling heritage and capturing local histories. Initially, the project will collect 20 Naqloona stories from different areas, depending on voluntary input from relatives, friends, and community members.
Last journeys playlist: the cinephilic mourning in Guddu Film Archive (Dr. Salma Siddique, IAAW)
The YouTube channel of Pakistani film collector Guddu Khan features over 300 videos, created and shared for over more than a decade now. Existing scholarship on the Guddu Film Archive have placed the collection in the matrix of infrastructural precarity, production decline and the absence of formal film archives in Pakistan. This presentation moves to examine the steady digital labour performed by Guddu Khan through his YouTube posts and videos. The particular focus of this presentation is the genre of 'last journeys', featuring the funerary processions and rites of deceased film personalities of Pakistani film. Commemorative and condolatory in content, the online videos show-case the intimate, at times familial, and affective relationship established by the cinephile with the subjects of his collection.
Through a digital ethnography of the channel, combined with personal interviews of the collector, this paper will seek to draw out the unique relationship that the collector has established with an institutionally neglected and hegemonically maligned film industry. Journeying between mourning and celebration, and between notions of piety and profanity, these videos uncover the impulses that characterize the way cinema in Pakistan is publicly related to. By attending to the mood, montage and movement created in the YouTube uploads, the paper will seek to put forward the ways in which the cinephile's idiosyncratic digital storage commemorates cinema against institutional neglect.
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