FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIO /
About
Members
Projects
Events
Screening 1 | Seeing Like/Against the State
ScreeningOctober 24, 2025 at 6:30–9:30pm
In-Person
La lumière collective
7080 Rue Alexandra #506, Montréal, QC H2S 3J5
Organizers Sanaz Sohrabi and Farah Atoui are delighted to announce the second edition of The Political Aesthetic screening series, unfolding from October 2025 to April 2026.
Join us for the opening screening, Seeing Like/Against the State.
This program features four films from Iran and Syria that center on infrastructure to explore how postcolonial states envision and stage themselves—through technology and ideas of progress—to shape collective memory and exercise power.
More Info
Program:
Tehran is the Capital of Iran, Kamran Shirdel, 1966, Iran, 18’
Film-Essay on the Euphrates Dam, Omar Amiralay, 1970, Syria, 13’
A Flood in Baath Country, Oamr Amiralay, 2003, Syria, 45’
Blames and Flames, Mohammadreza Farzad, 2012, Iran, 27’
The screening will be followed by a discussion with anthropologist Cynthia Kreichati and film scholar Claire Begbie.
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.
This second season in the Political Aesthetic screening series takes place from October 2025 to April 2026.