The King of the Cockroaches
Directed by Timothy Cooper
Synopsis
The degraded surfaces of mass-copied films – the glitches, scanlines, errors, and coding artifacts – rather than the filmmaker’s imprint, reveal the material culture and social life of film consumption. “The King of the Cockroaches” studies the informal infrastructures, practices, technologies and institutions that, in the absence of a national film archive, have kept Pakistani film heritage alive. Looking to both the material infrastructure for cinema distribution and the conditions of its circulation, the film is a found-footage journey through orphaned VHS master copies, grey-market VCDs, and lossy YouTube transfers, celebrating the indestructible archive of Pakistani cinema.
SCREENING FOLLOWED BY Q&A WITH DIRECTOR TIMOTHY COOPER AND PRODUCER ABEERA ARIF-BASHIR
