Raindrops For Rani
Details
Artist: Aqsa Arif
Title: Raindrops For Rani
Year: 2025
Duration: 17 minutes 34 seconds
Medium: Single channel video with stereo sound
Credit: Aqsa Arif, Raindrops For Rani, 2025. Commissioned by Edinburgh Printmakers as part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2025 with funding from Creative Scotland. Courtesy of the Artist. Selected for AFI'26 by Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland
Raindrops For Rani (2025)
Aqsa Arif Selected by Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland.
Raindrops of Rani, draws on the tragic figure of Heer from the Punjabi love story Heer Ranjha. Arif reimagines her as Heera, a displaced mother navigating life in a Scottish high-rise flat with her young daughter after a flood destroys their home. Through this hybrid fantasy, Arif stages a layered narrative of a mother and daughter adapting differently and unequally to an environment marked by indifference and hostility. At its core lies the story of Arif’s own arrival in the UK from Pakistan. Her family was initially placed in a high-rise council flat in Prospecthill Circus, on Glasgow’s Southside. Years later, they were moved again by local authorities to facilitate the production of Sony Bravia’s 2006 Paint advert, an extravagant campaign requiring 1,500 explosive charges and 70,000 litres of paint. Directed by Jonathan Glazer with a reported budget of £2 million, the advert became an iconic spectacle. Meanwhile, the mostly working-class residents, refugees and asylum seekers, were displaced and rehoused in other Glasgow high-rises. Raindrops of Rani, reflects on the stark contrast between this global spectacle and the overlooked realities of the community it disrupted.
Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland, say:
Raindrops of Rani draws from Arif’s family’s experiences within the Queen's Court high rise flats in Glasgow, weaving together lived memory, generational trauma, and South Asian folklore. The work explores displacement not only as rupture but also as a site of resilience and reconnection. At its core lies the story of Arif’s arrival in the UK from Pakistan. Her family was initially placed in a high-rise council flat in Prospecthill Circus, on Glasgow’s Southside, by the Home Office. Years later, they were moved again by local authorities to facilitate the production of Sony Bravia’s 2006 Paint advert, an extravagant campaign requiring 1,500 explosive charges and 70,000 litres of paint. Directed by Jonathan Glazer with a reported budget of £2 million, the advert became an iconic spectacle.
The film directly interrogates the ethics of looking by juxtaposing the "vibrant" 2006 Sony Bravia advertisement with the lived reality of the displaced residents. While millions watched the "iconic" explosion of colour, the mostly working-class residents, refugees, and asylum seekers, including Arif’s family, were displaced and rehoused in other Glasgow high-rises. In this powerful, surrealistic work, Arif reflects on the stark contrast between this global spectacle and the overlooked realities of the communities it disrupted. The film becomes a meditation on the psychic and familial consequences of such displacements, especially for those still negotiating belonging in a place that promises refuge but feels alien.
Claire Jackson, Senior Curator, Tramway
Artist Q&A
What does a democratic, international film programme such as Artists' Film International mean to you as an artist?
I’m excited at the prospect of something that can exist across different contexts and cultures, and be read in ways I could never fully anticipate. I’m drawn to that openness: the idea that the work can shift in meaning, whilst still holding onto an emotional or conceptual familiarity that hopefully carries through each encounter.
In a world that is shaped by borders and by ideas of state purity, separation, and insularity, there’s something vital about a platform that allows work to move across these imposed lines, challenging the status quo and unsettling the rigid structures we can sometimes feel trapped in.
Raindrops of Rani was made with so much love and attention from the many collaborators, it feels like the perfect avenue for it to be a part of Artists’ Film International, where it can be shown in many contexts, furthering exchange, as well as recognition of all of the talented collaborators' work. Perhaps it is a little cringy, but I do feel creativity is most alive in the spaces where different perspectives meet with openness, finding the overlaps and differences, ultimately reshaping one another.
What compels you to work with moving image, and when did you first become interested in the medium?
I first began working with moving image at art school, experimenting on my mum’s phone. It felt like an immediate medium, something that could capture a sense or feeling very quickly. Funnily enough, I was really drawn to using the time-lapse feature, but I think what interested me was the possibility of manipulating reality into something that, without the medium, wouldn’t be possible. The ability to exaggerate reality into something unreal or altered became an exploration within the medium.
After completing an animation elective where I learned the basics of editing and using After Effects, I became totally engrossed in the idea of creating unreality through reality. Narratives have always interested me, and I became preoccupied with the question of why — why we believe images, why we emotionally invest in constructed worlds. I was also really compelled by the architecture of the cinema space itself: this dark hole where we sit watching light arranged into something that feels real, yet is completely contrived, passively absorbing it whilst suspending our disbelief.
At the time, I also felt quite disengaged from the idea of the white cube and who enters and ‘understands’ the gallery. It felt deeply entrenched in classism, whiteness, and inaccessibility, producing categories of insiders and outsiders. Even as an artist, it took me a long time to feel any sense of comfort within these spaces. Somehow, the dark cinema space always felt more accessible, perhaps because we can hide there. In the white cube, the audience feels lit up, on display, being watched whilst watching. Ideas around voyeurism, spectatorship, and surveillance became a point of interest for me.
I’m still as compelled by moving image because of its ability to immerse the viewer in a directed way, challenging both the artist and the viewer’s engagement. It pushes me to create my most considered works, in the most collaborative settings. I find it deeply satisfying working with a team and building something collectively rather than in isolation.
This year’s theme, A Kind of Power, brings together films which explore the ethics of looking, watching and witnessing. In a world where images circulate instantly and visibility can both empower and endanger, how do you navigate the responsibility of looking — and of asking others to look — in your work?
In putting this narrative into the world, I was very conscious of the socio-political weight of framing a complex South Asian mother/daughter dynamic. I didn’t want the work to unintentionally reproduce familiar stereotypes or flatten that relationship into something easily legible for the white gaze. As a Scottish Pakistani artist, I’m constantly negotiating how personal narratives, identity, and community are perceived, particularly how they can be misread, exoticised, or fetishised, especially when dealing with themes like generational trauma.
That awareness feels necessary, but it also creates a tension with the desire to tell stories honestly and with nuance. There’s a risk that self-consciousness can begin to shape or limit what feels possible to say. In making this work, I’m aware that I am, in some sense, opening up intimate experiences to interpretation and speculation.
Fantasy, for me, becomes a way to navigate that responsibility. It allows me to create a certain distance, translating the personal into something less fixed and more open-ended. Through fiction, I can hold complexity without over-explaining, and resist the demand for cultural legibility. It also feels important to situate brown narratives within genre and the fantastical, as a way of expanding how these stories can exist beyond realism or ethnographic framing, and into spaces of speculation, imagination, and possibility.
Ultimately, I think of looking, and inviting others to look, as an act that requires care and consideration. At the same time, I want to challenge the viewer in their own biases and in their responsibility to look with attentiveness rather than exoticisation.
Please share a list of books, music, films, artworks, thinkers, spaces and places that inspire your practice, and in particular have fed into your thinking around this film.
Shah Jo Risalo — folklore of the Seven Queens of Sindh
Folklore of Heer Ranjha
Sony Bravia ‘Paint’ advert
Family wedding videos
Punjabi folk songs
The song Choli Ke Peeche
Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer
The Fall, Tarsem Singh
Red Road, Andrea Arnold
Our Eyes as Commonly Tender: Visual Justice in the Filmmaking of Pratibha Parmar
Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English
What new projects or lines of research are currently preoccupying you?
Currently, I’ve been thinking around South Asian diasporic connections to pop culture and media as forms of cultural memory and connection, alongside formations of syncretic identity and mythology. I’m particularly interested in how histories of cultural exchange, and colonial entanglement have produced layered mythologies, especially through cross-cultural blending such as the transfigurations between Hindu mythologies and Greco-Roman systems, and how these narratives are continually reinterpreted across time and geographies.
What feels most exciting to expand on is my interest in Bollywood as spectacle, and as a point of connection within the South Asian diaspora, particularly through music, choreography, and dance. Over the last few years, I’ve been working with family wedding archives and videos, which become a kind of microcosm of lived heritage, and have informed a lot of my thinking and practice. I’m interested in examining the narratives conveyed through both personal archives and cinematic dance sequences, and how narrative is constructed, encoded, and revealed through movement, rhythm, and excess.
I’m also interested in what happens when these forms are connected to genre, specifically horror, as a way of opening up the more uncanny or destabilising aspects of South Asian folklore, poetry, and ghazals. Using heightened space, repetition, and emotional excess, I’m interested in creating a framework to think through the cyclical, fragmented, and unsettled qualities within these blended fictional creations.
Details
Artist: Aqsa Arif
Title: Raindrops For Rani
Year: 2025
Duration: 17 minutes 34 seconds
Medium: Single channel video with stereo sound
Credit: Aqsa Arif, Raindrops For Rani, 2025. Commissioned by Edinburgh Printmakers as part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2025 with funding from Creative Scotland. Courtesy of the Artist. Selected for AFI'26 by Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland