Avant seriana (Before Seriana)
Samy BenammarMom, 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?
Bloom
Helena Girón, Samuel M. DelgadoThe mythical Isla de San Borondón (St. Brendan’s Isle) appears and disappears. Throughout history, it has been placed near the Canary Islands on maps. The island’s legend and allure became so pervasive that expeditions were organized to discover and conquer it for three hundred years. After centuries of oblivion, it has finally been found.
Le disque de poussière (The Dust Disk)
Charline DallyLe disque de poussière invites us to probe tiny meteorite particles, the terrain of an intriguing investigation into the origin of stars. Their irregular morphology reveals a mineral writing that researchers attempt to decipher, until it mysteriously seems to come to life.
Radius Catastrophe
Jad YoussefRadius Catastrophe (المستباحة الأرض) follows an alien investigator sent to Earth to examine the aftermath of a
complex murder. As they gather evidence and analyze the landscape, the investigation blurs the line between
forensic inquiry and a deeper, unsettling mystery about the act of observation.
A Thousand Landscapes
A Thousand Landscapes, A Thousand Bodies is a two-fold film program that explores the tension between the collective and the individual by looking at how landscapes and bodies interact with each other. Conceived as a diptych, these two programs bypass the difference of scale between the body and the landscape to take interest in the trajectories of contamination that puts these two entities in constant relation and negotiation.
In this first program, the landscape acts as both a witness and an active participant in the layering of memory, history, and time. It emerges as a repository for individual and collective stories. A Thousand Landscapes brings together works focused on terrains where narratives collide and unsettling experiences leave their imprint.
In Before Seriana, Samy Benammar confronts us with the hills, the skies, the trees, and the desert fauna of an estranged homeland, scrutinizing a landscape that became familiar through the eyes of those that violated it. Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado’s Bloom follows the trace of a fleeting island that seems to refuse to be mapped or recorded, revealing geographies that simultaneously enchant and consume. The third film of the program, Le disque de poussière by Charline Dally, invites viewers to investigate meteorite particles to identify crater impacts, only to discover that by merely observing this miniscule landscape, we are erasing all the evidence it contains that could tell us its story. Finally, Jad Youssef’s Radius Catastrophe delves into the aftermath of a crime, where the land is an impossible witness to human violence and fragility.
The landscape becomes a vessel, holding clues to events both past and yet to come, while simultaneously evolving, erasing, and reshaping the traces it carries. Through the probing lens of the camera, these films transform the landscape into a dynamic space of questioning and revelation—one that challenges inherited myths and imposed narratives. The landscape becomes a site of memory and transformation, where permanence and impermanence coexist, and where the hidden layers of meaning and affect it contains are uncovered. In this interplay, the stories we tell are both shaped by and actively shape the ever-changing world around us.
Active Listeners with HELD Agency will be present for this program.
2 Sussex Ave, Toronto, ON M5S 1J5
Sidewalk-level entrance, elevator and ramp available, door width 32 inches, no automatic doors. No accessible parking on-site. Four wheelchair accessible seats in the cinema. 15 step-free seats in row 9. Accessible gender-neutral washroom located on the 2nd and 3rd floor. Please note that there is construction on site; the venue remains accessible.
For a map to Innis Town Hall, click here
(ARTISTS)
