Unfaded Memories Film World Premiere

USAAF 2026 Event - details tbd

The centerpiece of this project is a hybrid short documentary featuring Oakland-based choreographer Joti Singh, who honors her great-grandfather Bhagwan Singh Gyanee—an early South Asian immigrant and founding leader of the Ghadar Party, an anti-colonial movement formed in the Bay Area in 1913. In her dance-theater work Ghadar Geet, Joti embodies Gyanee’s story on stage. Inspired by this performance, I adapted her concept into a film that highlights the experiences of South Asian immigrants detained at Angel Island Immigration Station.

The film captures Joti, dressed as Gyanee in a costume inspired by her stage show, moving through the same spaces on Angel Island that her great-grandfather once endured. Dance becomes a language, expressing the physical and emotional weight of early immigrants—the tension of interrogations, the quiet of long detentions. It depicts not only Gyanee’s story but also the journeys of thousands of South Asians who passed through this entry point. Audio interviews with Joti and historians Dr. Seema Sohi and Erika Lee, accompanied by Punjabi and South Asian folk music, give voice to memory and history within the space itself.

Between 1910 and 1940, roughly 8,000 South Asian immigrants entered Angel Island. They endured harsh interrogations, long detentions, and deportations exceeding fifty percent. Those admitted faced racial labor exclusion and violence. Many, including Gyanee, recognized parallels between colonial oppression in India and systemic racism in the U.S., inspiring the Ghadar Party’s mission to fight British rule from abroad. Unfaded Memories brings erased histories into view, creating space for reflection, movement, and intergenerational dialogue. These immigrants—farmers, railroad, and mill workers—stood with other colonized communities, including Irish and Ethiopians, forming transnational networks of liberation long before contemporary racial justice movements. The project uncovers a lineage of resistance and solidarity, challenging the “model minority” myth and encouraging solidarity with other Bipoc communities.

The event will include a film screening, Q&A, a Bhangra performance by Joti and her company, a participatory movement-for-healing session led by a certified Dance/Movement Therapist, exploring personal and ancestral connections through embodied practice, and a curated exhibition of photographs, letters, and inscriptions from early 20th-century South Asians, developed with guidance from Sonia Dhami and Dr. Seema Sohi.

// Still from the film Inkilab.