all voices are mine (2018) was filmed at Bari Studio in Lahore, not far from Basir Mahmood’s childhood home. The artist-filmmaker had a budget that allowed him to do a single day of shooting. He hired a team of technicians and professional actors for a day and asked them to reproduce for his camera gestures that they remembered having performed in other films. The result is a disparate collection of images, visual reminiscences evoking both the history of Lollywood and his own memories. We see actors carrying out series of simple actions, which are then edited together into a loose sequence following the temporal transition from day to night. Every shot in the film shows a transition from movement to stillness or even the transformation of bodies into living tableaux.

Contrary to the film’s title, Mahmood does not regard his film as being altogether his own but as a kind of compromise between himself and his actors; he uses them as models stripped of emotional affect in order to bring out something that escapes dramatization or fiction—as if painting was suddenly induced to take on a temporal dimension.

—Philippe-Alain Michaud