Social Circles
Eri SaitoSocial Circles explores the unique dynamics and communication that arise from the inability to fully connect and understand each other. In our daily lives, we form various social circles through interactions with friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and family. Contemplating the faint boundaries that emerge from individual communication sparks thoughts about how we might otherwise interact with one another.
Offline Messages
Jia-Chae ChangWeng Nao, Jin Lian, and Qiu Miaojin each share a hometown with Chang, the filmmaker. Having grown up in Changhua City, Taiwan but in different generations, each have different contexts for modernity and each capture their own dislocated marginal positions as "the Other", having faced multiple intersections while searching for their own identity. This work attempts to bring literature into the moving image while contemplating the connections between these differences.
غنينا قصيدة The Poem We Sang
Annie Sakkabغنينا قصيدة The Poem We Sang is a meditation on family love and longing for home. It centers on an old audio recording in which my uncle Elias was telling my brother how our family had to flee from the bombing in 1948 and run away from our family home at Al Baq’a neighbourhood in Jerusalem, Palestine, without personal belongings, thinking the family would return home in a week's time. Years later, when my grandmother finally did return to the family home with my uncle, just after the 1967 Six-Day War, her home was occupied by settlers.
On and On and On
Evelyn PakinewatikAlbert Ward was a highly regarded Mi'kmaq Elder from Eel Ground First Nation and a very dear friend and teacher to my family. This recording was the last time we spoke to him, and the first time I had met him since infancy. On and On and On was filmed during the pandemic, on the sacred ceremonial lands of my home territory, following the pathways and protocols specific to my family and to myself as a disabled artist.
Why Do Ants Go Back To Their Nest?
Alex LoAn experimental, auto-fiction film about the filmmaker digging a hole from Toronto to Hong Kong.
Keep Looking
Ayo AkingbadeA young filmmaker arrives in New York to find finance for an impossible feature.
Moonscapes
Mona BenyaminMoonscape is a short film which takes the form of a music video for a ballad. The song traces the story of a man called Dennis M. Hope, who claimed ownership of the Moon in 1980 and thus founded the Lunar Embassy – a company that sells land on a variety of planets and Moons, and makes a connection between his story and that of the director's – a young Palestinian woman living under the Israeli occupation, longing to end the misery of her people in any way possible.
We Are Not Alone
Adebukola BodunrinWunmi, a reclusive young Nigerian immigrant, becomes convinced that a mysterious object approaching Earth's orbit holds the key to her loneliness. Determined to decode the alien signal, she enlists the help of Jenny, a stranger. Adapted from the short comic by award-winning graphic novelist and screenwriter, Ezra Claytan Daniels, We Are Not Alone is a lo-fi sci-fi tale shot on salvaged and laser-etched Ektachrome stock.
nowhere close to halfway
nowhere close to halfway does not offer neat resolutions. Instead, the seven films included in this program dwell in the ongoing attempt, the search, the still-unfulfilled—and, to varying degrees, the necessity of continually reaching for both what might be and what could have been. nowhere close to halfway holds within it a restless yearning that propels the program forward—an unresolved desire pulses through each of the films, manifesting as a longing for connection, family, home, nation, and self-determined futures.
In Eri Saito’s Social Circle, the narrator tries to make sense of her solitude through a critique of social pleasantries, such as the disingenuous invitation “When are we grabbing that drink?” while the audience gauges her story for signs of loneliness.
Offline Messages by Jia-chae Chang critically reflects on nostalgia through the tethers that bind one’s hometown across generations, cycles of colonialism, writers, and the filmmaking process, while Annie Sakkab’s غنينا قصيدة The Poem We Sang is dreamlike and steeped in nostalgia. Yet, its perfect memories fracture as moments of violence—both past and present—puncture the narrative.
In On and On and On, Evelyn Pakinewatik collapses time to share a prophecy by Elder Albert Ward. Alex Lo’s humorous film, Why Do Ants Go Back To Their Nest?, attempts to bridge an impossible distance—both spatially and temporally—in order to reach home. Meanwhile, Ayo Akingbade connects the dots between New York and London, trying to bring a dream to life in her most recent film, Keep Looking.
Mona Benyamin introduces us to the Lunar Embassy and the possibilities might hold in Moonscapes, while in We Are Not Alone, a film by Adebukola Bodunrin, explores an unlikely partnership born out of necessity after aliens make their presence known to Earthlings, and closes with an invitation: “Do you have beer?”
nowhere close to halfway, the title borrowed from Why Do Ants Go Back To Their Nest?, suggests both overwhelming distance and anticipates a possibility of togetherness. The works presented in this screening resist closure while acknowledging sites of connection in the wavering dislocation of exile and forced migration, the shifting terrain of language and communication, and the search for meaning in the spaces between you and I.
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 to Innis Town Hall, click here
