Leviathan Cycle, Episode 2: Yasmine

In the first episode of the cycle we hear from Ben, about his childhood memories, when his father was a marine biologist at the Natural History Museum in London, intertwined with the back-story of the cataclysm that has met mankind and provides the context for the present moment and the narrative of the Leviathan Cycle.

Episode 7 is intertidal, locating itself in and as mangrove, by speaking to interconnectedness and enmeshment. It constructs future oral histories by inviting real participants and asking them to image and imagine themselves as their future selves. This discursive, collaborative exercise in place-making is one where both science and the imaginary dovetail into a possible, collective futurology. In blending fact and speculative fiction, narrative and documentary, Shezad enacts a unique, sliding temporal scale that underlies the entire Leviathan project, connecting deep time to tentative futurity.

Towards the Possible Film was shot at Legzira beach in Sidi Ifni, Morocco. In a landscape that could well be an alien planet, otherworldly figures appear as if to threaten the peace. Dawood found a deep source of inspiration in the region’s history and the many wars fought in the 1950s and ’60s between Spain, Morocco and the independent Saharan tribes.

Ben and Yasmine arrive at a strange and enigmatic community based on an island in the lagoon of Venice. They engage in scavenging raids to the mainland and partake in the group’s Bacchanalian orgies. Their gluttonous sexual vagrancy is paralleled with images of overfishing and unnecessary cruelty in the fishing industry of the Mediterranean.

Our protagonists are taken captive aboard a gigantic cargo ship, whose megalomaniacal captain Ismael entertains biblical pretensions. Ben is made to ‘pay his passage’, while a ghostly Yasmine stalks the empty corridors of the ship. Whales and whaling become a key subject – interrogating colonial and indigenous politics in the process.

A Mystery Play was filmed in a monumental and elaborate early twentieth-century Masonic building in Winnipeg, Canada. This film is inspired not only by Masonic rituals, but also by the town’s history, renowned for its extensive culture of performance and burlesque, in particular the shows of Buster Keaton and Harry Houdini.

A mixed-reality music concert using cutting edge technology to take audiences on a virtual audio-visual journey through Bangladesh past and present, encompassing mystical Baul singers from rural Kushtia, experimental electronics, and hip-hop from the streets of Dhaka, interspersed with archival and contemporary documentary footage.

Ben and Yasmine continue further south to the Moroccan coast, where they are attacked by Jamila and her group of parasitic bandits. The ethics of survival and predator-prey relationships in both human and marine species are explored, as members of another group intervene. But is this out of the frying pan and into the fire for the protagonists?

Ding Ling is a research scientist who fled Indonesia in the wake of rising sea levels, and at the start of the episode disembarks from the cargo ship on which she had been living. She moves onwards to explore new/old territories, revealing something of her past in Indonesia and China via Singapore as the episode progresses. During her journey she meets the resourceful Senait, an Eritrean refugee who subsists by evaporating water from the Dead Sea to make it potable. In her ongoing effort to compile an archive of those who remain, Ding Ling records an interview with Senait, where Senait recounts her own peripatetic past and perilous journey through Sudan.

A young Chinese boy and girl are sent on a mission to retrieve the 'Glorious 100' - agents who were sent to this planet millennia ago to study and observe.