EAST
Noor KhanIn East, Khan communicates the crisis of having been robbed of a homeland, while also settling and being complicit in the destruction of the home of Indigenous peoples. The film considers her responsibility as a settler since she sees no return home for herself and her community.
Proximity Study (Sight Lines)
Elizabeth M. WebbProximity Study is an attempt to measure closeness despite the temporal distance. Webb’s grandfather (whom she never met) worked as a longshoreman in Brooklyn. Webb filmed the docks on 16MM film and rowed to this location. The physical film print trailed behind the boat, reaching to bridge the distance.
from where to where من وين لوين d'où vers où
Nada El-Omari“In the pieces I store and carry along my many different roads, my dialects may be signs of bruises but reclaimed they form the skin and voice I live in. In the in-betweens, language soothes, swans mend, and the daily brings calm. We are the comfort of our multiples.”
-El-Omari
Forty Blocks
Cheryl L’HirondelleForty Blocks chronicles a Metis woman's journey from a home, where as a child she was abused, to her Kokum's house where she was never allowed to go. The journey and the song it inspires are healing, as she reclaims her connection to her culture, her blood, and the earth.
, not like us. Not like us
Tanya Lukin Linklater, not like us. Not like us draws inspiration from Lukin Linklater’s book of poetry, Slow Scrape. Specifically, this work cites her writing about girlhood as a response to the attempted assassination of girls’ education activist, Malala Yousafzai. , not like us. Not like us, centres memory through dance, image, and text.
Empire
Noor KhanEmpire questions the relevance and utility of preserved places, by following the journey of a South Asian elder walking home from an ethnic grocery store close to Scarborough Museum. An audio interview with the artist’s mother provides context into western imperial housing design(s).
Distance Studies
Distance Studies traces a series of relationships that exceed linear space and time. This selection of works by artists and filmmakers Noor Khan, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Elizabeth M. Webb, Nada El-Omari, and Tanya Lukin Linklater ask, what does it mean to know someone? Must they be within arm’s reach? What can we access through shared spaces? Some pose inquiries around how physical distance blurs definitions of ‘home’, while others trace distances between inhabited spaces, and still others foreground memory and familial knowledge as something immediate. These films consider what haunts us, what we embody, and what we learn about ourselves through people and spaces that are absent, or once were.
Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Cree/Halfbreed; German/Polish) is an award-winning and community-engaged interdisciplinary media artist, singer/songwriter, and critical thinker whose family is from Papaschase First Nation / amiskwaciy wâskahikan (Edmonton) and Kikino Metis Settlement, Alberta. Her work investigates and articulates the intersections of nêhiyawin (Cree worldview) and contemporary time-place incorporating sound, Indigenous languages, music, and old and new technology.
Elizabeth M. Webb is an artist and filmmaker originally from Charlottesville, Virginia. Her work is invested in issues surrounding race and identity, often using the lens of her own family history of migration and racial passing to explore larger, systemic constructs. She has screened and exhibited in the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Ecuador, Singapore, Switzerland, Mexico, Spain, Austria, Norway and Germany and was a recipient of the inaugural Allan Sekula Social Documentary Award.
Nada El-Omari is a filmmaker and writer of Palestinian and Egyptian origin based in Montreal. She centeres her practice and research interests on the intergenerational transmissions of memories, displacement and the stories of belonging and identity through a poetic, hybrid lens. Her films have recently been shown at Nuit Blanche Toronto, Les Instants Vidéos, NYU’s Orphan Films Symposium, Belfast Film Festival, Palestine Cinema Days, Visions Cairo, Toronto Palestine Film Festival, and Shasha and Tenk.
Noor Khan is a community-engaged multidisciplinary artist, art director and producer. She was raised in Scarborough, born in Saudi Arabia, with roots in South Asia. She holds an M.F.A in Community Arts and a Certificate in College Teaching of Art from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), a Certificate in Digital Art from OCAD University, and a B.A. in Community Development from the University of Toronto.
Tanya Lukin Linklater's practice cites Indigenous dance and visual art lineages, structures of sustenance, and weather as an organizing force. She undertakes embodied inquiry and rehearsal in relation to scores and ancestral belongings in museums and elsewhere alongside dance artists, composers, and poets. Through collaboration, her work reckons with histories that affect Indigenous peoples’ lived experiences, (home)lands, and ideas. She continues to write in relation to what she has come to call felt structures.
1411 Dufferin Street, Unit D, Toronto, ON, M6H 4C7
For a map to Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC), click here
