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Axis 3 | Ghosts and Songs
ScreeningFebruary 24, 2026 at 6:30–9:30pm
In-Person
La lumière collective
7080 Rue Alexandra #506, Montréal, QC H2S 3J5
Feminist Media Studio is delighted to announce the second edition of the screening series The Political Aesthetic: Revitalizing Memories, En/Countering Histories, unfolding from October 2025 to April 2026, curated by Farah Atoui and Sanaz Sohrabi.
Join us for the third screening, Ghosts and Songs.
Ghosts and Songs is a journey into the spaces where memory cannot be written, only sung, whispered, and passed down across generations. This program explores how communities and individuals hold onto their histories when official records have been lost, stolen, or written by the dominant historical voices. Moving across the Caribbean, Palestine, Brazil, and Algeria, these films reveal that the past is not a static document to be archived, but a living, breathing presence that resides in voice, ritual, and the very landscape.
This program brings forward the importance of oral history, folklore, and sonic archives as an embodied tool for survival. When colonial and dominant powers have systematically erased or rewritten histories, the voice becomes a site of remembering and transmission. Folklore songs and body rituals become coded language that carry the stories of the dispossessed across generations. The sonic archive—whether a song, a haunting hum, or a ritual chant—bypasses the biased "objective" text and speaks directly to a collective consciousness, preserving the emotions, traumas, and hopes that the textual or the visual archives fail to carry.
Ghosts and Songs gathers four poetic essay films that summon memory through voice, ritual, and landscape. The films in the program each operate as "acoustic ghosts," allowing for psychological engagement with landscapes and different built environments. In Chanson pour le Nouveau-Monde, Miryam Charles entwines personal loss with diasporic remembrance, tracing a daughter’s recollection of childhood and disappearance across geographies. Noor Abed’s Our Songs Were Ready for All Wars to Come turns to Palestinian folklore as an embodied archive, where choreographed gestures and song reactivate collective histories of mourning and resistance. In Solmatalua, Rodrigo Ribeiro-Andrade composes a sensorial meditation on the African diaspora in Brazil, layering archival traces, music, and protest into a dreamlike counter-history. Finally, Avant Seriana by Samy Benammar reflects on return, colonial myth, and fractured belonging in the Aurès mountains of Algeria. Across these works, song becomes testimony and haunting becomes method: each film mobilizes sound and image to reclaim obscured pasts and to imagine forms of collective survival.
Hauntology proposes that we are always haunted by what came before—by unresolved histories, by the voices of the dead, by futures that were imagined but never realized. In the context of Ghosts and Songs, this haunting is not supernatural but deeply political. Here, each song is not a mere sensorial experience element but structure, an oral archive that carries loss, grief, memory, and insurgent knowledge across generations.
More Info
Program:
Chanson pour le Nouveau-Monde, Miryam Charles, Canada 2021, 9 min.
Our songs were ready for all wars to come, Noor Abed, 2021, Palestine, 22’
Solmatalua, Rodrigo Ribeiro-Andrade, Brazil, 2022, 15’
Avant seriana, Samy Benammar, Canada, 2024, 19 min
The screening will be followed by a discussion with filmmaker Miryam Charles and historian Christopher Silver.
Film Synopses:
Chanson pour le Nouveau-Monde, Miryam Charles, Canada 2021, 9 min.
Years after the disappearance of her father in Scotland, a young woman recalls her childhood on a Caribbean island (La distributrice de films).
Our songs were ready for all wars to come, Noor Abed, 2021, Palestine, 22’
Our songs were ready for all wars to come (2021) is a 22-minute film of choreographed scenes based on documented folk tales from Palestine. It begins with four minutes of darkness and the haunting sound of a woman’s voice. The perforated edge of the film, occasionally silhouetted by flashes of light, highlights the nature of the work as a mediated document. Images of women performing draw connections between latent stories of water wells and communal rituals associated with disappearance, mourning and death. The only narration in the film is a song, which is sung by Palestinian singer Maya Khaldi. Its lyrics are a collage of different folk tales. The film explores the critical stance of ‘folklore’ as a source of knowledge and its possible connection to alternative social and representational models in Palestine. How can folklore become a common emancipatory tool for people to overturn dominant discourses, reclaim their history and land, and rewrite reality as they know it? (Ikon Gallery).
Solmatalua, Rodrigo Ribeiro-Andrade, Brazil, 2022, 15’
A ritual greeting to Creation and a photograph of a slave ship initiate this organic visualization of memories from the African diaspora. “The history of Brazil has been written by White hands. Both Blacks and Indigenous people who lived here haven't had their history written yet.” Rodrigo Ribeiro-Andrade, who previously explored similar territory with scenes from sugar plantations in The White Death of the Black Wizard, stays well clear of traditional historical reconstruction in this intuitively edited composition of archive footage, singing and other, impressionistic, elements. This is film as an act of protest, in and of itself. It is as if Ribeiro-Andrade is drawing directly from the source, a dream world of memories, as he blends images of early settlements and children at play in favela alleyways. Performances, dances and provocative activist acts jostle with abstract light, the sound of nature, modern music and melancholy vocals. This is no “objective” historical record, but a poetic essay that connects us directly with a collective consciousness (IDFA).
Avant seriana, Samy Benammar, Canada, 2024, 19 min
Mom, you brought me back to our homeland. All I know about these harsh landscapes I learned from books written by the hand that burned these mountains. I try to undo the colonial myths engraved into my memory, but the hills escape my gaze. Do you think I, too, have become the white djinn spoken of by the legends surrounding our martyrs? Avant Seriana is an essay film shot in Super 8 in the Aurès region of Algeria. Observing the landscapes of my native land, I realize that they are divided into several images and times. Two different countries are formed: the Algeria of the mountains and an imaginary one born of the tales I’ve read in colonial archives. My gaze no longer belongs to the places where I was hoping to return to my roots. – Samy Benammar
Ghosts and Songs is the third screening in the second season of the Political Aesthetic screening series, which takes place from October 2025 to April 2026.
Admission is free and no RSVP is needed. Please come on time to ensure access to seating.
Accessibility: there are 8 steps leading to the elevator inside the building.