Film Categories: Diaspora

  • Avant Seriana

    Mom, 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? Avant Seriana is an essay film shot in Super 8 in the Aurès region of Algeria. Observing the landscapes of my native land, I realize that they are divided into several images and times. Two different countries are…

  • One Thing I Can Afford

    Louie Sanchez is the performance moniker of Filipinx artist Eirene Cloma. Cloma has recently completed a small collection of songs that broadly reflects on their working-class Filipinx upbringing in North Vancouver and the entanglements of diaspora, interracial relations, and queer desire that texture their everyday experiences. The video for their song One Thing I Can Afford broadly addresses queer and trans friendship in the diaspora, Filipinx masculinities, and everyday enactments of transgenerational care.

  • Facing the Music

    FACING THE MUSIC:ABOUT A MAN WHO ESCAPED STALIN AND HITLER—AND PUTIN’S RESURRECTION OF BOTH STALIN AND HITLER IN UKRAINE. Wolodymyr joined the Ukrainian partisans in 1939. They were hiding cultural lead- ers who would otherwise be persecuted or murdered by Stalin. After Hitler invaded in 1941, Wolodymyr was abducted to Germany, surviving forced labour and incar- ceration in a concentration camp. Extrapolating from Wolodymyr’s story, the film shows how the atrocities he experi- enced via Stalin and Hitler have been the ‘blueprint’ for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Putin’s Wagner Group mercenaries were named after Hitler’s favourite composer: Richard Wagner. The…

  • Sex is Sex

    Sex is Sex is a new collaborative video series between Vivek Shraya and Christopher Sherman that playfully challenges assumptions about sexual roles and preferences based on appearance and gender.

  • Karaoke

    The home has changed. The palm oil trees have grown in endless symmetry. The landscape rusts and the nostalgia turns. KARAOKE is a homecoming story. BETIK returns to his village to help his mother with the karaoke a few years after the death of his father. During the day, he has also taken a job with his uncle making karaoke videos. KARAOKE is a story that takes you back home yet reminds you to go back where you came from. KARAOKE is a debut feature film about home and deception in a karaoke club within a palm oil plantation in…

  • Jaddoland

    A visit to my mother’s home art studio in Texas prompts a deeper exploration into the meaning of home across generations and landscapes.

  • Echolocation

    The rain in Oakland, my grandmother’s home in Baghdad, my aunts’ voices in What’s App, my daughter learning to count to 10, my brother playing the darbuka, the cicadas in Texas, the walls of my studio, the search for new forms.

  • Landmarks of Memory

    A tattoo ritual and hookah session memorializes a pre-war flower shop. After seeing its storefront in archival footage of the Lebanese Civil War, a first-generation daughter seeks information and connection to place. Scenes of 1976 Beirut are paired with today’s developed landscape, while roses are etched and coconut coals burn in a snowy diasporic setting.

  • Both, Instrument & Sound

    Both, Instrument & Sound employs tension as an aesthetic strategy, to explore solidarity, collective struggle, and the transformation of these values under neoliberalism. The film follows the life of Tony over 3 years as he describes his process of political activism from the 1970s onwards, which cannot be disentangled from his friendships and his lovers. The film’s score – co-written with musicians, the film’s cast and crew – sonically explores different interpretations of tension—both in response to Tony’s narration and to the musicians’ existing approaches to tension as a musical, cinematic, scientific, and political experience. Everyone translates, performs and remixes…

  • Monument

    Beginning in ghostly abstraction and accumulating texture by texture into a droning meditative trance, Monument deepens to a visual and sonic intensity, mixing Super 8 film with video footage to create a complicated, multilayered encounter with the tension of protest and reclamation. A vivid and energetic durational experience of collective resistance and celebration. Super 8 footage of the decaying monuments of Presidents Park (Croaker, VA) are layered with video footage captured on Monument Avenue (Richmond, VA) during the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Themes of registration and re- calibration are explored through form and content and…