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Axis 2 | Haunted Landscapes
ScreeningJanuary 30, 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 second screening, Haunted Landscapes.
Haunted Landscapes brings together a constellation of short experimental and essay films that approach land not as a mere backdrop, but as an active archive—scarred, surveilled, destroyed, occupied, and made to bear the weight of colonial violence. Across different geographies and histories, these works insist that landscapes witness and remember. They carry traces of colonial dispossession, resource extraction, forced labor, ecological devastation, and nuclear and military experimentation, countering official histories that seek to erase or naturalize these violences.
As they assemble and rework archival film, draw on colonial-era stock photographs, and mobilize contemporary documentary imagery, the films in this program attend to what haunts the land: the lives interrupted and displaced by the force of colonization and its afterlives. From the annihilation of Indigenous life and wildlife in settler-colonial Canada, to the militarized surveillance of Palestinian land; from the afterlives of slavery in Brazil, to the photographic capture of colonized nature in the Philippines; from botanical archives entangled with the British occupation of Palestine, to radioactive fallout from French nuclear bombs in Algeria drifting across deserts and borders—each work summons the landscape as witness, protagonist, and sometimes as a site of resistance.
Taken together, these films ask urgent questions about the act/process of image-making itself: How do images participate in regimes of control and appropriation? What does it mean to look at and represent landscapes shaped by violence without reproducing it? And how might cinema listen to non-human narratives, attending to what the ground, animals, plants, stones, and ruins continue to say? Haunted Landscapes invites viewers to encounter land as a living, unsettled record, one that refuses closure, and continues to haunt the present.
More Info
Program:
Sisters and Brothers, Kent Monkman, Canada, 2015, 3’
UNDR, Kamal Aljafari, Palestine, 2024, 15’
The White Death of the Black Wizard, Rodrigo Ribeiro-Andrade, Brazil, 2020, 10’
To Pick A Flower, Shireen Seno, Philippines, 2021, 17’
The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing, Theo Panagopoulos, 2024, UK, 17’
And still, it remains, Turab Shah and Arwa Aburawa, 2023, Algeria-UK, 28’
The screening will be followed by a discussion with film scholar Agustín Rugiero and filmmaker and scholar Aylin Gökmen.
Film Synopses:
Sisters and Brothers, Kent Monkman, Canada, 2015, 3’
In a pounding critique of Canada's colonial history, this short film draws parallels between the annihilation of the bison in the 1890s and the devastation inflicted on the Indigenous population by the residential school system (NFB).
UNDR, Kamal Aljafari, Palestine, 2024, 15’
A helicopter sweeps the desert, surveying a land at once ancient and modern, natural and built. Farmers work their fields, children play and bells sound a call to prayer. Dynamite ruptures the earth. UNDR is a poignant found-footage essay film about an otherworldly landscape charged with history and potential that has become an eerie site of surveillance and incursion (letterboxd).
The White Death of the Black Wizard, Rodrigo Ribeiro-Andrade, Brazil, 2020, 10’
In The White Death of the Black Wizard, the Afro-Brazilian director Rodrigo Riberio-Andrade revisits the country's painful slave past, evoking the many lives that were destroyed by the violence of colonization. At the heart of this experimental short is a 19th century letter written by a slave named Timóteo, just before he took his own life. The filmmaker skillfully juxtaposes this man's story with archival footage from the time, unfolding the faces reduced to a life of silence. By killing himself, Timóteo made his final gesture of insurrection, unfortunately the only one that his agency allowed him, to free himself from his suffering and, finally, to break the silence imposed on his people (tenk).
To Pick A Flower, Shireen Seno, Philippines, 2021, 17’
Picking flowers is an act of violence, as is clearing ancient forests and moving natural resources from one continent to another. In her video essay, Shireen Seno, a film auteur of Filipino origin, comments on stock photos taken from the period of American colonialization of the Philippines between 1898 and 1946. She takes note of the similarities between photography and colonialism because images, in the same fashion as political power, are a form of appropriation (Ji.hlava).
The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing, Theo Panagopoulos, 2024, UK, 17’
When a Palestinian filmmaker based in Scotland unearths a rarely-seen Scottish film archive of Palestinian wild flowers, he decides to reclaim the footage. This tender film essay questions the role of image-making as a tool of both testimony and violence when connected to entanglements between people and the land (Scottish Doc Institute).
And still, it remains, Turab Shah and Arwa Aburawa, 2023, Algeria-UK, 28’
And still, it remains tells the story of Mertoutek, a village nestled in the Hoggar Mountains of Algeria’s Southern Sahara and home to the Escamaran community of Black Algerians. Surrounded by ancient rock art, the area was also the site of French nuclear bombs between 1961-66 and continues to suffer the consequences of radioactive fallout circulating in the water and soil. Summoning the landscape as a witness and protagonist; experiences of French nuclear experiments, faith and justice are narrated by the voices of multiple residents. By affording the residents distance from the lens, the film also pushes against forms of visual capture that reproduce a colonial gaze and challenges visibility as the currency for political redress. Winds migrating across the Sahara have recently carried sand containing nuclear remains back to France – a reminder that the environmental afterlives of colonialism cannot be contained or forgotten (LUX).
Haunted Landscapes is the second 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.