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Runa Islam
Runa Islam
First Day of Spring, 2005
16mm film
7:00 minutes
Courtesy White Cube, London
Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, 1970
BIO (PDF)
Runa Islam is represented by:
First Day of Spring
Most of the 500,000 rickshaw pullers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, are countryside migrants; the families they left behind often depend fully on their income. They face internal struggles fighting off competition and crime. At the same time, Dhaka’s government tries to ban them from main roads, blaming them for the cities endless traffic jams.The First Day of Spring was filmed in Dhaka in 2004, when Islam returned to her place of birth for the first time in 23 years. It can best be described as a group portrait constructed almost entirely out of slow tracking shots around and in the midst of a group of motionless rickshaw wallahs resting on their bicycles. As in How Far to Farö, Islam clearly indicates floor (the dusty ground under the rickshaw’s wheels), ceiling (the sky seen through a roof of leaves), and all sides of her location. She takes several points of view, ending in a series of close-ups of each individual character, before watching them drive off into the evening sun.
In contrast to How Far to Farö however, in The First Day of Spring the protagonists are being placed ‘centre stage’ as Islam puts it: ‘One is more used to looking at their necks than at their faces’. The intense visual gratification of the footage is thematised, not avoided, and while there is no narrative as such, the way Islam positioned and filmed her subjects makes for a highly stylised, seemingly rehearsed and fictional whole.
Courtesy White Cube