Past event

27 October 2023
6:30pm

Palestinian and Indigenous short film screening

Image: Basma Alsharif, We Began by Measuring Distance (video still), 2009. 
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Image: Basma Alsharif, We Began by Measuring Distance (video still), 2009. 

27 October 2023. Free entry.

Palestinian and Indigenous short film screening
Friday 27 October, 6:30pm

A selection of Palestinian and Indigenous short films will be screened at the opening night of My throat/a shelter, an exhibition by Selina Ershadi and James Tapsell-Kururangi.  Koha is welcome, with all proceeds from the screening going towards UNRWA emergency aid in Gaza. With thanks to the artists, Vtape and Galerie Imane Farès for their generous loan of these works.

 

FILM PROGRAMME

Razan AlSalah
أبوكي خلق عمره ١٠٠ سنة، زي النكبة
Your father was born 100 years old, and so was the Nakba, 2018
7:00 mins

A Palestinian grandmother returns to her hometown Haifa through Google Streetview, today, the only way she can see Palestine.

Based in Tio'tia:ke/Montreal, Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian artist and teacher investigating the material aesthetics of dis/appearance of places and people in colonial image worlds. Her work has shown at community-based and international film festivals and galleries including Art of the Real, Prismatic Ground, RIDM, HotDocs, Yebisu, Melbourne, Glasgow and Beirut International, Sharjah Film Forum, IZK Institute for Contemporary Art and Sursock Museum. Razan teaches film and media arts at the Communication Studies department at Concordia University.

Basma Alsharif
We Began by Measuring Distance, 2009
19:06 mins

Long still frames, text, language, and sound are woven together in this narrative of an anonymous group who fill their time by measuring distance. Innocent measurements transition into political ones in this examination of the limits of visual media in the face of tragedy, and the capacity of image and sound to communicate history.

Basma al-Sharif is a Palestinian artist working in cinema and installation. She developed her practice working between the Middle East, Europe, and North America and is currently based in Berlin. Her practice looks at cyclical political conflicts and confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works.

Roy Dib
مونديال2010
Mondial 2010, 2014
19:30 mins

Mondial 2010 is a discussion of institutional borders in the modern day Middle East. It uses video as an apparatus to transgress boundaries that are inflicted on people. It is a travel film in a context that doesn’t allow travel, starring two male lovers, in a setting where homosexuality is a punishable felony. Shot with a hand-held camcorder, Mondial 2010 borrows the aesthetics of a travel video log. Normalising the abnormal, the film creates its own universe of possibility. In doing so it counters the dominant passive view of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict that foregrounds the victim/oppressor dynamic in the narrative.

Roy Dib is a Lebanese artist and filmmaker who challenges common notions of space and boundary, weaving together archival material, scripted text and hypothetical circumstances to chronicle the political narratives of our day. Dibb lives and works in Beruit.


Sky Hopinka
Dislocation Blues, 2017
16:57 mins

An incomplete and imperfect portrait of reflections from Standing Rock. Cleo Keahna recounts his experiences entering, being at, and leaving the camp and the difficulties and the reluctance in looking back with a clear and critical eye. Terry Running Wild describes what his camp is like, and what he hopes it will become.

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California; Portland, Oregon; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work is centred on personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, and language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non-fiction forms.