There’s a Hole in the World Where You Used to Be – Parity Pipeline Project

There's a Hole in the World Where You Used to Be

2025 00:15

THERE'S A HOLE IN THE WORLD WHERE YOU USED TO BE is a short film about memory and mourning. It departs from the premise that both grief and black holes are so dense and intense that they bend space and time around their specific gravity - each absence both a wound in the heart and a hole in the world.

ABOUT
BIO
SCREENINGS

Genre

Experimental Documentary Animation

Synopsis

THERE'S A HOLE IN THE WORLD WHERE YOU USED TO BE is a short, experimental film about memory and mourning, and about grief that overflows or fits poorly into the usual containers. It departs from the premise that both grief and black holes are so dense and intense that they bend space and time around their specific gravity - warping perspectives, reshaping the physical world, and throwing those caught in their orbit out of temporal sync. It combines still and moving images shot by the filmmaker with black hole simulations sourced from NASA, public satellite imagery, onscreen text, and spatialized 5.1 channel sound design. Throughout, old and new material blurs together to create spatial and temporal disjunctions. As the title indicates, THERE'S A HOLE IN THE WORLD WHERE YOU USED TO BE is concerned with the way grief can feel simultaneously personal and political, individual and collective; each absence felt as both a wound in the heart and a hole in the world.

Director Identity

Asian Middle Eastern BIPOC Of Asian Descent Of Middle Eastern Descent Additional Identities she/her

Bio

Mariam Ghani is a writer, director, editor, producer, archival researcher, and visual artist. Her short films, public projects, and multi-channel installations have been presented and collected worldwide, notably in Times Square and the new Terminal C at LaGuardia Airport; the Guggenheim, MoMA, Smithsonian, and Metropolitan Museums; Documenta 13 and the Liverpool, Lahore, Yinchuan, and Sharjah Biennials; and the Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, SFFILM, DOC NYC, and Ann Arbor film festivals, where she presented a juror's retrospective in 2022.

Ghani’s first feature, the critically acclaimed documentary WHAT WE LEFT UNFINISHED, tells the mostly true story of five unfinished Afghan Communist films. It premiered at the 2019 Berlinale, was released theatrically in the US, and had its streaming premiere on the Criterion Channel. It is distributed by Dekanalog, Good Docs, and Arsenal, and is currently streaming on Docuseek and Ovid. Her 2022 short THE FIRE THIS TIME was commissioned by Field of Vision and screened at BlackStar, BAMcinemaFest and Ji.hlava. Her second feature film, DIS-EASE, looks at the real consequences of how we fictionalize illness, and premiered at BlackStar and the Tate Modern in 2024. Ghani teaches film/video at Bennington College.

Screening History

Gallery premiere - Ryan Lee New York 2025

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