Screening Series: Resisting Displacement, Displacing Resistance
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La lumière collective, 7080 Rue Alexandra #506, Montréal, QC H2S 3J5
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.
Each screening will be followed by a collective reflection and discussion with local artists, researchers and filmmakers around the notions of displacement, refuge, political aesthetics, and creative resistance.
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Political Aesthetic Screening Series Program
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Screening 1 | October 30 | Militant Cinema
On militant cinema’s role in the creation and circulation of revolutionary and anticolonial imaginaries and emancipatory politics, and how this cinema persists in the form of contemporary and lively archives that resist visual displacement. RSVP to this screening here.
Conakry (2013), Filipa Cesar, 10’45
Via Dolorosa (2021), Oraib Tukan, 21’
Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory (2016), Mohanad Yaqubi, 65’
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Screening 2 | January 26 | Media as Sanctuary
On the role of digital media, screen culture, and virtual space as potent and imaginative sites and sights of refuge, solidarity, and resistance against hegemonic historical narratives, reading the image against the grain of oppressive national or colonial dominance in the popular culture.
Irani Bag (2021), Maryam Tafakory, 7′
Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old So Was the Nakba (2017), Razan Al Salah, 7′
If From Every Tong It Drips (2021), Sharlene Bamboat, 68′
The screening will be followed by a discussion with Razan Al Salah and Sharlene Bamboat, moderated by Sanaz Sohrabi and Farah Atoui.
Screening 3 | February 29 | Aftermaths of Displacement
On revisiting the aftermaths of displacement rendered in/visible in the histories of built environment, urban spaces, and landscapes to invoke and animate the lost and untold voices, stories, and events.
Galb’Echaouf (2021), Abdessamad El Montassir, 18’
Tellurian Drama (2020) Riar Rizaldi, 26’
The Secret Garden (2023), Nour Ouweyda, 30’
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.
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Screening 4 | April 12 | Ecologies of Resistance
On collective practices and acts of survival, refusal, and anti-colonial resistance through foraging, strikes, and labour mobilization.
Mobilize (2015), Caroline Monnet, 3′
Yugantar Film Collective (to be selected)
Wild Rice Harvest Kenora (1979), Alanis Obomsawin, 1’
Foragers (2022), Jumana Manna, 65′
The screening will be followed by a discussion moderated by Sanaz Sohrabi and Farah Atoui, speakers tbc.
ABOUT THE AXIS
The Political Aesthetic: Resisting Displacement, Displacing Resistance
The Political Aesthetic screening series explores how political action is performed by taking up space and place through artistic actions. Aesthetic and imaginative practices bring an entangled web of forgotten histories, memories, and geographies in relation to one another, mediated through new forms of encounter and arrangement. We focus on art’s capacity to reveal things-in-relation through formal experimentation, performative actions, and public interventions. We are focused both on the violence of the force of displacement, and the potency of displacement as a strategy of dissent, creating temporary and shifting spaces of inhabitation and intimacy, moving things out of the way to make room for new (and potentially liberatory) forces.
