A Thousand Landscapes
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?
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.
For a map of Innis Town Hall, click here
Images Festival is committed to providing an accessible festival and continues to work to reduce barriers to participation at our events. This year, we are implementing a COVID-19 policy to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission for all, and to prioritize the participation of people who are disability-identified, immunocompromised, or part of an otherwise vulnerable group.
The following guidelines will be in place: Self-Assessment: We ask that staff and participants screen themselves for COVID-19 before visiting the exhibition.
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.
Charline Dally
Charline Dally (she/they) lives between France and Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Her practice combines analog video signals, computer-generated imagery, glass and textile through films, installations, and performances. They graduated from Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains and UQAM in visual arts. She has done artistic residencies at Signal Culture (Owego, NY) and the Society for Technological Arts (Montreal). Her work has been presented in various institutions and festivals such as MOCA (Toronto), MAJ (Joliette, QC), FIFA (Montreal), Ann Arbor Film Festival (Ann Arbor, MI), FNC (Montreal), VIFF (Vancouver), CTM Festival (Berlin), MUTEK (CA, ES, AR), BISFF (Beijing), OMAF (Seoul), and Les Abattoirs (Toulouse).
Helena Girón
The work of Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado investigates the relationship between mythology, history, and materialism. Their films have been programmed at festivals like Venice, San Sebastian, Toronto, Locarno, New York, and many others. They have produced installations and performances in art centers like MCARS (Madrid), CCCB (Barcelona), CGAC (Compostela), BAM (New York), TEA (Tenerife) and Galeria Solar (Vila do Conde).
Jad Youssef
Jad Youssef is a filmmaker, teacher, and independent researcher. My work probes different social peripheries, obscured landscapes and urban enigmas. He is currently a tenure-track assistant professor of Art at the American University of Beirut (AUB).
Samuel M. Delgado
The work of Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado investigates the relationship between mythology, history, and materialism. Their films have been programmed at festivals like Venice, San Sebastian, Toronto, Locarno, New York, and many others. They have produced installations and performances in art centers like MCARS (Madrid), CCCB (Barcelona), CGAC (Compostela), BAM (New York), TEA (Tenerife) and Galeria Solar (Vila do Conde).
Samy Benammar
Filmmaker, photographer, and critic, Samy Benammar holds a master's degree in film studies from the Université de Montréal. His Algerian and working-class origins are central to his experimental work, which questions the socio-political stakes of archival and current images. His practice is as much interested in film (super 8, 16mm or 35mm), digital and analog media. This hybridization tends to question the interactions between technicality and politics of images.
