Ring and the Fish

Directed by Alia Syed, co-produced by Alia Syed and Sarah Neely. Additional cinematography, Luke Fowler. Sound, Pete Smith and Mark Vernon.

A new 16mm feature-length film from Alia Syed. This multi-strand, creative non-fiction work explores the history and perspectives of migrants from the Indian subcontinent who made Glasgow their home (a city once known as the Second city of the British empire). Working through photographs, personal and public archives, the film considers the ways in which memories are held and shaped within communities over time, looking at notions of assimilation, aspiration and the psychic processes at play in homemaking. 

Funding and awards

This feature is developed from Alia Syed’s solo exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow (with support from Creative Scotland)

Other websites  Alia Syed,  LUX (Alia Syed)

Biography

Alia Syed is a renowned experimental filmmaker born in Swansea, Wales and lives between London and Glasgow. She has been making experimental films in Britain for over 30 years. Syed is interested in how subjectivities are produced through culture, diaspora and location. Her work interrogates the protean nature of self-narration: enfolding fact, fiction, present and past, how histories are made and unmade. 

Syed has been showing extensively in prestigious institutions worldwide, including the Whitechapel Gallery (2023), Migrating Worlds, The Art of the Moving Image in Britain (2019, Yale Centre for British Art, USA); Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life (2019-20, Stuttgart); LUX London solo exhibition (2019) & Talwar Gallery, New York solo exhibition (2019).