CWC Global: Noorie

  • Thursday, May 23, 2024 / 7:00 PM - 9:45 PM (PDT)
  • Pollock Theater
  • Screening Format: DVD (114 minutes)
  • With Katie Young (Concordia University)
  • Director: Manmohan Krishna
    Starring: Farooq Shaikh, Poonam Dhillon, Madan Puri

Directed and produced by Manmohan Krishna and Yash Chopra, Noorie (1979) is a love story set in the Bhadarwah valleys of pre-insurgency Kashmir. The film portrays the budding romance between Noorie (Poonam Dhillon) and Yusuf (Farooq Sheikh), as they encounter deception, tragedy, violence, and ultimately revenge. Brimming with timeless hit songs including Chori Chori Koi Aaye (performed by Lata Mangeshkar), Noorie was a blockbuster both in India, and internationally. Its social and cultural themes have resonated with Muslim communities in global contexts, including Muslim regions of Ghana, West Africa. Even today, more than forty years after its release, the film continues to spark important conversations about the sociopolitical realities of Kashmir and political unrest across cultures.

Katie Young (Concordia University) joined moderator Francis Yeboah (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of Noorie, where they considered the reception of the film in Northern Ghana. This screening inaugurated a conference that was held the following day, entitled A Return to the African Personality: Intergenerational Conversations.

Biographies

Katie Young headshot

Katie Young (Concordia University)

Katie Young is assistant professor of Cultural Geography in the School of Irish Studies at Concordia University, Canada. She holds a PhD in Music and Geography from Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research examines the relationship between music, media, and everyday spaces, including research on Hindi film music in everyday life in Northern Ghana, and West African diasporic musical experiences in everyday life in Ireland.

francis-yeboah

Moderator Francis Yeboah

Francis Yeboah is a PhD student at the Department of Film and Media Studies. He received both his Bachelor’s degree in History and Master’s degree in Education from the University of Ghana. His Master’s thesis examined how films could be used to teach history in secondary schools. His research interests include using a transdisciplinary approach of combining history and film, archival practices, ethnography, and data visualization to explore commercial cinema, movie exhibition and reception in Ghana, as well as the construction of social identities around cinema spaces. Francis has also written about mobile cinema vans in Ghana, titled “Instructing on Screen: Cinema and Mass Education in the Gold Coast (Ghana), 1939-1960.”

This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.

CWC Global

Media are global by nature; they express culture just as much as they transcend borders. The CWC Global series is dedicated to showcasing media from around the world. This series features screenings and events that place UCSB in conversation with international media makers and global contexts across our deeply connected world.