We would be freer
Rana Nazzal HamadehThrough storytelling, this film looks at the sumac plant as medicine, spice, dye, and more. Staghorn sumac is native to parts of Turtle Island and tanner’s sumac to the eastern Mediterranean. Weaving the voices of two women, one from the Mohawk community of Kahnawá:ke and the other an internally displaced refugee in Ramallah, we would be freer invites contemplation on the role of sumac in two occupied lands. Mimicking the progression of the plant’s flowers from yellow to green to red, the film offers a cyclical reflection on connection to land, sustainability, and wild plants.
On the count of three
Nour BishoutyOn the count of three imagines a nonspecific hotel as a witness to a full spectrum of human activity. Punctuated with sets of instructional prompts, the film combines archival imagery and staged vignettes that fold fiction and historical narration to blur the lines between care, hospitality, and authoritarian impulses.
Welcome to Hotel Thai
Tripty Tamang PakhrinWelcome to Hotel Thai observes the daily rhythms of a family-run restaurant and lodge on the Nepal-India border. Through gestures of labor and silence, the film traces the unspoken relationship between the artist’s two mothers, women who share a husband and a home but do not speak. The work moves between memory and observation, language and its limits, to reflect on the endurance and tenderness that persist in the absence of words.
‘एक पुराना’ (The Old One)
Ankur YadavThis experimental film weaves visual and textual poetry into a non-linear narrative set on a hill. It captures climatic moments of storms, lightning and regional beliefs such as totka, a ritual to transfer curses, and the local disdain for pigeons as invasive beings. Interlacing myth, ecology, and anatomy through reflections on the human thumb, the film evokes the mystical entanglement between people, nature, and unseen forces.
HOMe
Kevin Lee BurtonHOMe is a three minute experimental video connecting the homoerotic with the land. Exploring gay identity and Indigeneity through photographs and text, this video playfully challenges notions of masculinity within the context of place and land.
Music: "Variations" by Nicolas Jaar
When The Blues Goes Marching In
Beny KristiaA young man narrated the details of his dream from last night to his father about the celebration of demonstration, anger, and graduation.
Babasaheb In Bengaluru
MahishaaIn Bengaluru, statues of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar lovingly called Babasaheb-stand as powerful symbols of resistance and equality. Unlike state-funded monuments, these statues exist through the efforts and sacrifices of the people. More than idols, they embody Babasaheb’s call to Educate, Agitate, and Organise, reminding us that his vision of dignity, education, and social justice continues to inspire millions across India.
Traces / آثار
Chantal PartamianIn the midst of the rubble of a torn building, a reel of film. An unlikely unraveling of queer bodies taking shape and form, while the war-torn city around and its spectacle of toxic masculinity glitches and disintegrates.
SAVAC Presents Monitor 16: Shadows Swept Far Away
SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) is thrilled to premiere the 16th iteration of Monitor, its longstanding experimental film and video program, in partnership with Images Festival.
This program approaches experimental cinema as a site where resistance and solidarity are not only represented but actively produced through form. Drawing on critical scholarship that situates ecology as a contested political terrain (Rob Nixon, Anna Tsing) and power as something that governs life and death (Achille Mbembe), the curators bring together eight films that reveal how states, religions, and colonial infrastructures shape bodies, land, and imagination. Non-linear montage, poetic language, and attention to non-human actors disrupt the authority of official histories, replacing them with intimate, fractured, and plural ways of knowing.
Hotels, urban streetcorners, sacred landscapes, and even domestic spaces become politicized witnesses—sites where extraction, displacement, nationalism, and authoritarian control leave their marks, but where care, labour, and memory also persist. By centering Indigenous, Dalit, diasporic, and subaltern perspectives, the program insists that resistance is not a spectacle but often takes subtle forms: tactile engagement with land, poetic refusal, archival re-stitching, and the reclaiming of ecological and bodily knowledge erased by colonial and state power.
In a time of global turmoil, environmental crisis, and intensifying border regimes, the works in Shadows Swept Far Away mobilize cinema as a practice of solidarity. Experimental form becomes a decolonial gesture, transforming attention, slowness, and fragility into political acts that imagine futures beyond domination, extraction, and dispossession.
ABOUT MONITOR
Monitor presents experimental short films and videos that initiate dialogue around the shifting nature of politics, economies, and landscapes across the Global South and its diasporas. SAVAC has engaged an international community of artists, curators, and audiences through Monitor since 2005.
Monitor 16 Goes on Tour!
Interested in hosting a screening of Monitor 16 at your organization? Please contact SAVAC’s artistic director, Abedar Kamgari, at abedar(at)savac.net
Sameena Siddiqui is a doctoral candidate in Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia. Her research, writing, and curatorial practice engage with vernacular modernisms, photography, histories of science and technology, and digital cultures through decolonial feminist and intersectional frameworks of resistance and collective care, foregrounding labour, caste, migration, and imperial infrastructures.
Vicky Moufawad-Paul is the Director and Curator at A Space Gallery in Toronto. She situates her work in terms of curatorial praxis which investigates aesthetic strategies for South West Asian self-determination, including counter archives, opacity, and refusal. Her writing and curating has been supported by numerous festivals, galleries and publications.
SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) a not-for-profit, artist-run centre in Canada committed to increasing the visibility of racialized artists by curating and exhibiting their work, providing mentorship, facilitating professional development, and creating a community for our artists. We support work that (in)directly addresses the ways histories of people of colour are represented alongside the story of ongoing colonialism on Turtle Island and post-colonial histories of the Global South. These works are challenging, experimental and offer multifarious perspectives on the contemporary world.
Q&A and Reception following the screening.
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
