FREE Screening of This Stained Dawn, a documentary on Pakistan’s 2020 Aurat March, followed by a panel discussion with director, Anam Abbas.
Cinemas of Resistance Screening Series: This Stained Dawn / Dagh Dagh Ujala
This Stained Dawn, is a feature documentary film following the activists behind the 2020 Aurat March (women’s march) in Pakistan. The film explores organizers negotiating a deeply surveilled, paranoia-inducing, and often physically violent space in the hopes of a revolution. A film for our times,Observational footage is supported by animation and archives that trace a history of state suppression and meditates on the act of activism itself. The screening will be followed by a discussion with Anam Abbas (Director), and Hiba Akbar (Aurat March Volunteer), moderated by Laila Malik (Author, Archipelago).
This event is part of the Cinemas of Resistance series, which explores how film and moving images become tools of dissent, memory, and political imagination. Across different geographies and struggles, the series asks how cinema documents movements, sustains collective hope, challenges dominant narratives, and creates new forms of solidarity.
The screening is co-hosted by Cinema Politica, a non-profit media arts organization dedicated to supporting the work of independent, political filmmakers in Canada and beyond, the The Tawoos Initiative, a genre-fluid platform dedicated to celebrating South Asian music in all its forms, Jamhoor, a Left media platform for South Asia and its diasporas and Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, Canada’s largest pan-Asian film festival showcasing contemporary Asian cinema and work from the Asian diaspora.
We look forward to gathering in community for an evening of cinema, dialogue, and critical reflection!
Program schedule:
Doors – 6:30 PM
Screening – 7:00 PM
Panel/Q&A – 8:30 PM