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Screening 3 | Aftermaths of Displacement
ScreeningFebruary 29, 2024 at 6:30–9:30pm
In-Person
La lumière collective
7080 Rue Alexandra #506, Montréal, QC H2S 3J5
The three short films featured in this program revisit, each in a different location, aftermaths of displacement rendered in/visible in the histories of built environment, urban spaces, and landscapes to invoke and animate lost and untold voices, stories, and events.
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Galb’Echaouf (2021), Abdessamad El Montassir, 18’
While investigating events that profoundly altered the landscape of the Western Sahara, El Montassir found himself faced with a silent environment, haunted by its complex socio-political history. As an alternative to human witnesses, he decided to focus on the organic life that inhabits the desert to reconstruct what people have forgotten.
Tellurian Drama (2020), Riar Rizaldi, 26’
May 5th, 1923. The Dutch East Indies government celebrated the opening of a new radio station in West Java. It was called Radio Malabar. In March 2020, the local Indonesian government plans to reactivate the station as a historical site and tourist attraction. Tellurian Drama imagines what would have happened in between: the vital role of mountain in history; colonial ruins as an apparatus for geoengineering technology; and the invisible power of indigenous ancestral. Narrated based on the forgotten text written by a prominent pseudo-anthropologist Drs. Munarwan, Tellurian Drama problematizes the notion of decolonisation, geocentric technology, and historicity of communication.
The Secret Garden (2023), Nour Ouayda, 27′
The inhabitants of a city awake one morning to find that never-before-seen trees, plants, and flowers suddenly erupted throughout the streets and in the squares. Strange and mysterious events start taking place as Camelia and Nahla investigate the origins of these new and peculiar creatures.
The screening will be followed by a discussion with filmmaker and archivist Chant Partamian and film scholar and programmer Sima Kokotović, moderated by Sanaz Sohrabi and Farah Atoui.
While this event is free, we suggest donating the equivalent of a ticket price (or more if you can) at the door. All the money raised will be sent to the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund. Otherwise please consider donating directly to this or other medical aid organizations (including Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, Medical Aid for Palestinians, Palestinian Medical Aid Relief Society) whether you are attending or not.
Aftermaths of Displacement is part of the The Political Aesthetic: Resisting Displacement, Displacing Resistance screening series (October 2023-April 2024), curated by Sanaz Sohrabi and Farah Atoui.
Aftermaths of Displacement is part of the The Political Aesthetic: Resisting Displacement, Displacing Resistance screening series (October 2023-April 2024), curated by Sanaz Sohrabi and Farah Atoui.
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Curated by FMS members Farah Atoui and Sanaz Sohrabi, the screening series offers a framework for exploring the Political Aesthetic through the medium of the moving image. The program is equally interested in filmmakers’ defiant artistic processes and in the practices of dissent that these filmmakers record on film, with a focus on creative interventions that aesthetically and politically resist displacement. The films and videos presented here address different conditions and forms of expulsion across multiple geographies–from Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran to the Western Sahara, Guinea-Bissau, and India, to Canada and the US. These works are also committed to resisting displacement by creating spaces and places that function as refuge. Whether imaginary or material, temporary or persistent, shifting or grounded, these sanctuaries take up space in ways that disrupt the force and violence of displacement as the outcome of colonization, state-formation, capital accumulation, and border consolidation. These sanctuaries also forge new places of encounter, exchange, and inhabitation that energize and expand political imaginaries.
The series takes place from October 2023 to May 2024.