HARLEM REALIZATION: A LIVE CINEMA FILM BY JON-SESRIE GOFF 

Harlem Realization is a live cinema performance composed of four movements,  blending portraiture, oral history, archival  research, sound, and experimental form into a  layered meditation on memory, displacement,  and Black cultural inheritance. The piece  opens with the first 1 minute and 45 seconds  of William Greaves’ The First World Festival of  Negro Arts, grounding the work in a diasporic  frame that links Harlem to Dakar, Senegal  and to the enduring cultural current between  Africa and Harlem. 

Through its live visual and audio storytelling,  the piece surfaces the constant wave of  migration, forced and chosen, that brought  generations of Africans to the shores of  Manhattan, shaping Harlem across the  centuries. Interviews with artists, elders,  spiritual leaders, and cultural workers animate  the neighborhood’s past and present, offering  a sonic and visual chorus of what remains,  what transforms, and what resists erasure. 

Movement I foregrounds contemporary  testimonies from Harlem residents. It includes  a reading of the poem “Dawn in New York” by  Claude McKay recorded by Noel W Anderson. Movement II features a live DJ mix by DJ  

George Twopointoh over rare outtakes from  Greaves’ The First World Festival of Negro  Arts. Movement III is anchored by Greaves’  prophetic 1970 New York Times op-ed  “100 Madison Avenues Will Not Save You.” Movement IV returns to present-day Harlem,  threading personal memory with collective  vision. 

Harlem Realization presents Harlem as a living  archive, a site of beauty, struggle, migration,  transformation, and imagination, and honors  those who have preserved and reimagined its  meaning across generations and geographies. — 

*Jon-Sesrie Goff | Director, Producer, Editor, Audio Recorder

Jenna Bond | Writer And Co-Producer

Daniel Patterson | Cinematographer

Javonn Patterson | Assistant Camera

Featuring Noel W. Anderson, Rev. Dr. Travis Boyd, Dr. Lena L. Green, Dsw, Lcsw, Russell Poole, Dianne Smith, Lillian Taylor, Susan Taylor, Tay Tiwoni, Lana Turner, Kara Young, Klay Young

William Greaves | Archival Narration

Dj George Twopointoh | Movement Ii Dj Performance Poetry By George Twopointoh & Jon-Sesrie Goff Percussion by Compton A. Timberwolf

Archival Visuals Outtakes From The First World Festival Of Negro Arts Directed By William Greaves

Movement III Anchored By “100 Madison Avenues Will Not Save You” A 1970 Op-Ed By William Greaves

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HARLEM (WORK IN-PROGRESS) | WILLIAM GREAVES, DAVID MARK GREAVES, USA, 39’ (EXCERPT)

In the summer of 1972 filmmaker William Greaves invited every surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance he could find – writers, artists, musicians, activists – to a cocktail party at Duke Ellington’s home in Harlem and brought three camera crews to film what unfolded. He originally intended the footage to be part of From These Roots, a history of the Harlem Renaissance he was working on at the time, but Greaves soon came to believe the party to be the most important event he ever captured, and that it needed to be a film in its own right. He would return to Once Upon a Time in Harlem a number of times over the course of his long and prolific career, yet the work remained unfinished at the time of his passing.

In 2007, Greaves wrote, “Once Upon a Time in Harlem is not a historical documentary. It will look at African American culture from the perspective of the artists, writers, and activists who took up the challenge of defining themselves as members of a distinct community in a society that did not recognize them as equals. My hope is that it will help us understand the creative process, how it has served the African American people, and what they have contributed to American and world culture.”

Once Upon a Time in Harlem spans both cultural and familial generations. William Greaves aspired his whole life to “live up to the expectations of the Harlem Renaissance.” Born in Harlem in 1926 at the height of Renaissance, Greaves grew up in the shadow of many of the artistic and intellectual giants captured here on film. William’s son David worked alongside his father – behind the

camera and in the edit room – for over 15 years before shifting the focus of his own life’s work to journalism. Significantly, he was one of the three cameramen in the room in 1972 filming with his father. William Greaves’ passing led his widow and life-long filmmaking partner Louise to take up the project again. Until her last breath, Louise worked on this film, and during that time Greaves’ son David and granddaughter Liani committed to continuing this important work.

Shown tonight were the first 39 minutes of the current work-in-progress feature, a project over 50 years in the making. The filmmaking team is actively raising funds to complete Once Upon a Time in Harlem in time for a 2026 release, on the centennial of William Greaves’ birth.

Contact William Greaves Productions: http://www.williamgreaves.com/contact-page/

THE BUS (1965) | HASKELL WEXLER, USA, 61’

The Bus, a documentary film by lifelong activist  and Academy Award-winning cinematographer  Haskell Wexler, gives agency to the anonymous  faces at the 1963 March on Washington for  

Jobs and Freedom, capturing in intimate detail  the story of one small group of individuals  that traveled across the country to stand in  the shadow of the Washington Monument  and demand equality and human rights for  African Americans. Self-funded, produced  and photographed by Wexler with a skeleton  crew that included filmmakers Nell Cox and  Mike Butler, the hour-long vérité documentary  begins in San Francisco as an integrated group  of 37 people, young and old, embark on a  three-day cross-country road trip organized by  the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). 

The Bus screened at the 1964 Flaherty Film  Seminar programmed by Jane Beveridge,  alongside James Blue’s The March, and works  by Joyce Chopra, Shirley Clarke, Yasujirō  Ozu, Satyajit Ray, Amilcar Tirado, Madeline  Tourtelot, George Stoney (& others).

The Bus  was restored by the UCLA Film & Television  Archive with funding provided by the National  Film Preservation Foundation. 

Distribution: UCLA Film Archive,  movies@cinema.uca-edu

POWER! (1966-68), EYES ON THE PRIZE: PART II (1990) | LOUIS MASSIAH, TERRY ROCKEFELLER, USA, 56’

Eyes on the Prize recounts the fight to end decades of discrimination and segregation. It is the story of the people — young and old, male and female, northern and southern — who, compelled by a meeting of conscience and circumstance, worked to eradicate a world where whites and Blacks could not go to the same school, ride the same bus, vote in the same election, or participate equally in society. It was a world in which peaceful demonstrators were met with resistance and brutality — in short, a reality that is now nearly incomprehensible to many young Americans.

The call for Black Power takes various forms across communities in black America. In Cleveland, Carl Stokes wins election as the first Black mayor of a major American city. The Black Panther Party, armed with law books, breakfast programs, and guns, is born in Oakland. Substandard teaching practices prompt parents to gain educational control of a Brooklyn school district but then lead them to a showdown with New York City’s teachers’ union.

Distribution: PBS Theatrical Distribution theatrical@pbs.org

THE SUMMER OF OUR DISCONTENT (EXCERPT) | SPEECH GIVEN BY MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. AT THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH ON FEBRUARY 6, 1964

Standing before a packed house at the Auditorium at 66 West 12th Street (this very venue) on February 6, 1964, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke against the injustices plaguing American society: economic hardship in black communities, resistance to civil rights legislation among the political elite, and inequality in the country’s public school system:

“In short, if this problem is to be solved, there must be a sort of divine discontent and a determination on the part of people of good will to work passionately and unrelentingly to see that the dignity and worth of the human personality will be respected. I have often mentioned the fact that if this problem is to be solved, somebody will have to get upset enough to work with determination to see that it is solved.”

However, King, always the uplifting orator, concluded with a hopeful message. Calling on the world to reject the status quo thinking holding back the Civil Rights Movement:

“...we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

With this kind of work and with this faith, 1964 can be a great year of achievement. With this faith, we will be able to adjourn

the councils of despair and bring new light into the dark chambers of pessimism. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”

King was prescient in his optimism: just months later, Congress would pass the Civil Rights Act, groundbreaking legislation for which the civil rights leader had fought so hard.

A PLATE OF SARDINES (1997) | OMAR AMIRALAY, SYRIA, 18’

In the company of fellow Syrian filmmaker Mohammad Malas, the ground-breaking director Omar Amiralay revisits the ruins of the destroyed Golan village of Quneytra, occupied by Israel and then abandoned following the 1973 war. A Plate of Sardines was programmed by Irina Leimbacher for the 2009 Seminar, “Witness, Monuments and Ruins”.

Distribution: Arsenal - Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V., distribution@arsenal berlin.de

MOUNE Ô (2022) | MAXIME JEAN-BAPTISTE, BELGIUM, FRENCH GUIANA, FRANCE , 16’

I close my eyes. The crowd makes me smile, breaks my body, and that’s the end. By presenting the festive events which escorted the projection of the film Jean Galmot aventurier by Alain Maline, where the filmmaker’s father played a role, the images of Moune Ô reveal the survival of the colonial inheritance within a Western collective unconscious always marked of stereotypes. From little gestures of daily life, the resistance toward oppression comes in its own rhythm.

Distribution: Square Eyes, info@squareeyesfilm.com

WHITE WALL TEHRAN (2007) | ANAHITA RAZMI, IRAN, 2’

“In January 2007 I was stopped by the Iranian  revolution guard on the streets in Tehran,  because I had apparently been filming them  with my video camera. They took me in and  erased 27 seconds of my video by filming the  white inner wall of their headquarters. The  erasure is now producing the art work.”

Distribution: Anahita Razmi,  mail@anahitarazmi.de

CIEN NIÑOS ESPERANDO UN TREN / ONE HUNDRED CHILDREN WAITING FOR A TRAIN (1988) | IGNACIO AGÜERO, CHILE, 56’

One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train poetically tells the story of a group of Chilean children who discover a larger reality—and a different world—through the cinema. Each Saturday, Alicia Vega transforms the chapel of Lo Hermida into a film screening room as she conducts a workshop for children under the auspices of the Catholic church. The hundred or so children involved had never seen a movie, and in the workshop they see and learn about the cinema: photograms and moving images, projection, camera angles and movement, film genres, and much more. And they watch movies: Chaplin, Disney, Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon, the Lumieres’ The Arrival of the Train to the Station. Finally, each child designs his own film with drawings. And then, for the first time in most of their lives, the children got to the movies in downtown Santiago. One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train played at the 1989 Flaherty Film Seminar programmed by Pearl Bowser and Grant Munro.

Distribution: Icarus Films, rentals@icarusfilms.com

AL MAHATTA / THE STATION (1989) | SUDANESE FILM GROUP, SUDAN, 15’ 

Set in Sudan in the late 1980s, people cross  the desert on foot or cover long distances  by car and truck. In Al Mahatta, Eltayeb  Mahdi shows encounters at one of the large  crossroads between the capital Khartoum in  the centre of the country and Bur Sudan on  the Red Sea.

Distribution: Arsenal - Institut  für Film und Videokunst e.V., distribution@ arsenal-berlin.de

THE DEEP WEST ASSEMBLY (2025) | CAULEEN SMITH, USA, 35’ 

The Deep West Assembly delves into the  concepts of geological time and Blackness  as camouflaged in image, song, and word  by Black and Brown creators (after thinkers  such as Suzanne Césaire and Ryan C. Clarke).  Incorporating images of geological formations  like lava caves, calderas, and salt domes, as well  as human-made landforms such as ancient  Choctaw burial mounds, The Deep West  Assembly paints a view of the American South  as a horizontal “Deep West” (a term borrowed  from poet Wanda Coleman). Smith situates  this cultural Deep West in the Mississippi River  Delta, exploring Black cultural practices as kin  to Indigenous traditions. Actor Dionne Audain  embodies multiple voices—guides—reading,  among other texts, Smith’s recent Volcano Manifesto (F Books, 2022) for the camera. —ASTRUP FEARNLEY MUSEET 

America’s violent history of settler colonial  extraction and enslavement is posited against  the expansive lens of geologic time in The  Deep West Assembly. Co-mingling theater  and computer animation, textiles and dance,  and Black and Indigenous cultural traditions,  Cauleen Smith locates an anti-racist  methodology for the end of the world in the  spaces underground, where the interior of the  Earth becomes a place of possibility and new  ways of relating.

Distribution: Cauleen Smith  Studio, cauleensmithstudio@gmail.com

VERS LES COLONIES / TOWARD THE  COLONIES (2016) | MYRIAM CHARLES,  CANADA/HAITI, 5’  

When a young girl is found off the Venezuelan  coast, a medical examiner will try to determine  the cause of death.

Distribution: La  Distributrice de Films, ladistributrice.ca / serge@ladistributrice.ca

MASCON (2025) | OTOLITH GROUP, UK, 32’  

Think of Mascon: A Massive Concentration Of  Black Experiential Energy as an audiovisual  investigation into the gestures, geometries,  grammars and geographies that compose the  forms and the forces of the films of Ousmane  Sembene and Djibril Diop Mambety from  1963 to 2004.  

As an audiovisual mosaic of still moving  images and sounds adapted from the frames  of the narratives of Mambety and Sembene  in order to circulate in a migratory orbit that  summons the borderless imagination of the  cine-Sahel. As morphologies that amplify  the Sembenean and Mambetyan motifs of  Cinemafricana until they assail the imagination  with the expansive deformation, centrifugal  

contraction, compacted compression,  and amassed concentration that Stephen  Henderson calls ‘Mascon’ or ‘black experiential  energy’.  

Distribution: LUX, distribution@lux.org.uk

JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN’T SEE IT (2018) | KARRABING COLLECTIVE, AUSTRALIA, 3’  

Produced for Dazibao, Montréal. A serious,  sometimes humorous, reflection on Karrabing  understandings of the ancestral present.

Distribution: Karrabing Collective,  karrabing.info

MY CALDERA (2022) | CAULEEN SMITH, USA, 5’  

“In My Caldera, imagery of the film is of  volcanic scenes in various life stages, from  pouring magma to inert mountain, with colors  unnaturally saturated—purple, blue, and  orange. The scratchy, chaotic aesthetic is  created through Smith’s proprietary process  of placing TikTok video stills onto 35 mm  film, then rendering it in 4K as an artifact  of the original footage. A driving, heavy  metal soundtrack provides an apt audio  accompaniment to the visual onslaught of  nature’s rage. A common thread in Smith’s  work, this exhibition looks to nature for an  alternative—to draw an analogy to human  dynamics.”–MORÁN MORÁN  

Distribution: Cauleen Smith Studio,  cauleensmithstudio@gmail.com

TAKE YOUR BAGS (1988) | CAMILLE  BILLOPS, USA, 11’  

“My take on slavery: when the Africans  boarded the ships bound for America, they  carried in their bags all their memories of  home. When they arrived in the New World,  their bags had been switched... Many  generations later, the children of these  Africans toured the Museum of Modern Art to  see the sculptures and art of Picasso, Braque  

and Matisse. Lo! There were the beautiful  icons of their ancestors, the images that had  been stolen from their bags.” 

—CAMILLE BILLOPS

Distribution: Third World  Newsreel, twn@twn.org

MI APORTE / MY CONTRIBUTION (1969) | SARA GOMEZ, CUBA , 33’  

An illustration of the difficulties women  encounter when they seek to achieve  economic integration and equality with men in  a country at the height of revolution. 

Digitized, subtitled, and restored by the  Vulnerable Media Lab at Queen’s University  situated on the territory of the Haudenosaunee  and Anishinaabek as part of the Sara Gomez  Project. This is the result of four years of  work undertaken in the Vulnerable Media  Lab by six graduate students, two post doctoral fellows and three undergraduates.  Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez made  19 documentaries and a feature film in Cuba  before her untimely death at 34 in 1974.

Distribution:

Criterion/Janus: booking@janusfilms.com

Susan Lord at the Vulnerable Media Lab: lords@queensu.ca

Instituto Cubano del Arte e  Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), cubacine. icaic.cu/es

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HARLEM (WORK IN-PROGRESS) | WILLIAM GREAVES, DAVID  MARK GREAVES, USA, 25’ (EXCERPT 2) 

In the summer of 1972 filmmaker William  Greaves invited every surviving member of the  Harlem Renaissance he could find – writers,  artists, musicians, activists – to a cocktail  party at Duke Ellington’s home in Harlem  and brought three camera crews to film what  unfolded. He originally intended the footage  to be part of From These Roots, a history of  the Harlem Renaissance he was working on  at the time, but Greaves soon came to believe  the party to be the most important event he  ever captured, and that it needed to be a film  in its own right. He would return to Once Upon  a Time in Harlem a number of times over the  course of his long and prolific career, yet the  work remained unfinished at the time of his  passing.  

In 2007, Greaves wrote, “Once Upon a Time  in Harlem is not a historical documentary.  It will look at African American culture  from the perspective of the artists, writers,  and activists who took up the challenge of  defining themselves as members of a distinct  community in a society that did not recognize  them as equals. My hope is that it will help us  understand the creative process, how it has  served the African American people, and what  they have contributed to American and world  culture.” 

Once Upon a Time in Harlem spans both  cultural and familial generations. William  Greaves aspired his whole life to “live up to  the expectations of the Harlem Renaissance.”  Born in Harlem in 1926 at the height of  Renaissance, Greaves grew up in the shadow  of many of the artistic and intellectual giants  captured here on film. William’s son David  worked alongside his father – behind the  

camera and in the edit room – for over 15 years  before shifting the focus of his own life’s work  to journalism. Significantly, he was one of the  three cameramen in the room in 1972 filming  with his father. William Greaves’ passing led  his widow and life-long filmmaking partner  Louise to take up the project again. Until  her last breath, Louise worked on this film,  and during that time Greaves’ son David and  granddaughter Liani committed to continuing  this important work.  

Shown this day were the last 25 minutes of  the current work-in-progress feature, a project  over 50 years in the making. The filmmaking  team is actively raising funds to complete  Once Upon a Time in Harlem in time for a  2026 release, on the centennial of William  Greaves’ birth.

Contact William Greaves Productions: http://www.williamgreaves.com/contact-page/

SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE (1981) | WILLIAM GREAVES, USA, 60’

In his one-of-a-kind fiction/documentary hybrid Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, the pioneering William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York’s Central Park, leaving them to try to figure out what kind of movie they’re making. A couple enacts a breakup scenario over and over, a documentary crew films a crew filming the crew, locals wander casually into the frame: the project defies easy description. Yet this wildly innovative sixties counterculture landmark remains one of the most tightly focused and insightful movies ever made about making movies.

In this unclassifiable film-about-filmmaking, Greaves quickly turns the process inside out, leaving it to his beleaguered crew members and occasional passersby to weigh in on the course of the production as the actors’ screen test continues to roll, and a second and third crew film the filming. Greaves wrote in his original proposal for Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: “There is a tremendous unstated need on the part of audiences for a new cinema language; one in which a more total statement of reality can be made… A language whose intimacy catapults the viewer into a state of consciousness that broadens his perception and perspectives of the social issues which are fiercely rocking the boat of what could become a Great Society.” This landmark of experimental vérité screened at the 1991 Flaherty seminar programmed by Stephen Gallagher and Coco Fusco, a moment Greaves himself credited with bringing the film, already over 20 years old, into the cultural conversation. Greaves wrote at the time: “The Flaherty Seminar has got to be the toughest, most valuable, most stimulating arena in which a filmmaker can present his or her work.” and credits Flaherty Seminar for emboldening his career as a radical experimental filmmaker.

Distribution: Criterion/Janus: booking@janusfilms.com

THE MARCH (1964) | JAMES BLUE, USA, 33’

The March is an award-winning documentary by filmmaker James Blue (1930-1980) about the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August of 1963. Blue filmed participants as they prepared for the March in their home cities, followed them as they traveled to Washington, and recorded their reactions as they listened for the first time to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s iconic speech “I Have A Dream” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Edward R. Murrow once said The March was “the finest argument for peaceful petition of redress of grievance that has ever been put on film.”

MY CALDERA (2022) | CAULEEN SMITH, USA, 5’  

“In My Caldera, imagery of the film is of  volcanic scenes in various life stages, from  pouring magma to inert mountain, with colors  unnaturally saturated—purple, blue, and  orange. The scratchy, chaotic aesthetic is  created through Smith’s proprietary process  of placing TikTok video stills onto 35 mm  film, then rendering it in 4K as an artifact  of the original footage. A driving, heavy  metal soundtrack provides an apt audio  accompaniment to the visual onslaught of  nature’s rage. A common thread in Smith’s  work, this exhibition looks to nature for an  alternative—to draw an analogy to human  dynamics.”–MORÁN MORÁN  

Distribution: Cauleen Smith Studio,  cauleensmithstudio@gmail.com

TAKE YOUR BAGS (1988) | CAMILLE  BILLOPS, USA, 11’  

“My take on slavery: when the Africans  boarded the ships bound for America, they  carried in their bags all their memories of  home. When they arrived in the New World,  their bags had been switched... Many  generations later, the children of these  Africans toured the Museum of Modern Art to  see the sculptures and art of Picasso, Braque  

and Matisse. Lo! There were the beautiful  icons of their ancestors, the images that had  been stolen from their bags.” 

—CAMILLE BILLOPS

Distribution: Third World  Newsreel, twn@twn.org

MI APORTE / MY CONTRIBUTION (1969) | SARA GOMEZ, CUBA , 33’  

An illustration of the difficulties women  encounter when they seek to achieve  economic integration and equality with men in  a country at the height of revolution. 

Digitized, subtitled, and restored by the  Vulnerable Media Lab at Queen’s University  situated on the territory of the Haudenosaunee  and Anishinaabek as part of the Sara Gomez  Project. This is the result of four years of  work undertaken in the Vulnerable Media  Lab by six graduate students, two post doctoral fellows and three undergraduates.  Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez made  19 documentaries and a feature film in Cuba  before her untimely death at 34 in 1974.

Distribution:

Criterion/Janus: booking@janusfilms.com

Susan Lord at the Vulnerable Media Lab: lords@queensu.ca

Instituto Cubano del Arte e  Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), cubacine. icaic.cu/es

FIRST WORLD FESTIVAL OF NEGRO ARTS  (1966) | WILLIAM GREAVES, USA, 41’  

In 1966 in Dakar, Senegal, over two thousand  dancers, artists, and writers from Africa  and the African Diaspora came together to  participate in the historic First World Festival  of Negro Arts. William Greaves traveled to  Dakar with the United States Information  Agency to document the historic event, which  was attended by an extraordinary cast of  luminaries, both on stage and in the audience,  from thirty countries—among them, Duke  Ellington, Langston Hughes, Alvin Ailey, Aimé  Césaire, and President Leopold Senghor. 

Contact William Greaves Productions: http://www.williamgreaves.com/contact-page/

DÍA DE LA INDEPENDENCIA / DAY OF  INDEPENDENCE (1992) | ALEX RIVERA, USA, 2’ 

Día de la Independencia is a satirical movie  trailer that mimics the cinematic obsession  with ‘alien invasions’ (Men In Black, Starship  Troopers, and of course, Independence Day).  

OBJECTS DO NOT RANDOMLY FALL  FROM THE SKY (2025) | MARIA ESTELA PAISO, PHILIPPINES, 10’  

Standing by the beach, teenage Sita confesses  to her mother that she almost drowned in  these waters when she was a child. In turn,  her mother admits that though she grew up  by the sea, she never learned how to swim.  

Sita and her mother turn into half-fish-half humans and swim through their turbulent  past in Zambales, all the while listening to  the local fisherfolk recount China’s territorial  aggression in the West Philippine Sea. 

GUIDED TOUR OF A SPILL (II Part of LIFE  ON THE CAPS (PART III) (2018 - 2022) | MERIEM BENNANI, MOROCCO, 15’  

Meriem Bennani’s Guided Tour of a Spill acts  as an interlude between her groundbreaking  Party on the CAPS (2018), her pseudo documentary set in the Moroccan quarter of  the CAPS, and a narrative sequel presented  at the Renaissance Society and Nottingham  Contemporary in 2022. The exhibition  consists of the titular multi-channel video  projected and displayed on sculptural, kinetic  screens alongside new drawings of scenes  from the world of the CAPS. One screen,  broadcasting what could be an A.I.-generated  children’s video, is topped by helicoptering  ropes that slap the gallery walls. Inspired by  the compilation structure and synesthetic  drive of Disney’s Fantasia (1940), Guided  Tour of a Spill centers less on overt narrative  and more on the visceral and sensorial  pleasure of music, dance, athletics and  humor. Throughout the exhibition, Bennani  playfully blends humor and critique, weaving  an expanded allegory for how media circulates  through channels of digital and geopolitical  power, both online and in the physical spaces  we inhabit. 

BETHLEHEM BANDOLERO (2004) | LARISSA SANSOUR, PALESTINE, 3’  

Bethlehem Bandolero is a kitsch video  featuring Sansour herself as a Mexican  gunslinger arriving in Bethlehem for a duel  with the Israeli Wall. Wearing a big sombrero  and a scarf, the artist walks the streets of  Bethlehem and greets the locals before  taking off for her final showdown.

RED CHEWING GUM (2000) | AKRAM ZAATARI, LEBANON, 11’  

Red Chewing Gum is a video letter that  tells a story of separation between two  men, set within the context of the changing  Hamra, a formerly booming commercial  center. The video looks at image making in  relationrelationship to consumption and the  possession of desired subjects. It examines  issues of desire and power, and the attempt to  capture fleeting time.

1941 (2021) | ASIM ABDULAZIZ AHMED, YEMEN, 4’  

“In his short film 1941, Asim Aziz explores  themes of cultural isolation and the  desperation for distraction. The short-sighted  lives his peers lead are represented in the  numbing, knitting pattern the actors carry  out throughout the film. The film was funded  by the British Council and was the first  experimental movie to be produced and shot  in Yemen to win international festival awards.”  

EL ENVIADO (AUNQUE NO SEA MÁS QUE  UNA TREGUA) (2022) | SOFÍA GALLISÁ  MURIENTE, PUERTO RICO, 24’  

Improvising a ritual with music, food, drinks  and books, a group of friends call on the spirits  of the past and confront them, unpacking  the colonial legacies that inhabit an Airbnb  house originally built for the last US American  appointed governor of Puerto Rico, before it’s  sold and that history is no longer accessible.

TROKAS DURAS (2025) | JAZMIN GARCÍA,  USA, 17’  

A visual journey through the interior  landscapes of a Jornalero’s dreams, his waking  reality in L.A., and what it looks like when a  group of people relegated to serving others  labors for their own elevation of body and  spirit. An homage to the unique, idiosyncratic,  and customized old pick-up trucks driven by  Latino day laborers and the intimacy that is  cultivated in and around them.

THE TERROR AND THE TIME (1979) | VICTOR JARA COLLECTIVE, USA/GUYANA, 70’  

The terror is British colonialism in Guyana; the  time is 1953, the year of the first elections  under a provisional democratic constitution.  Stylized scenes photographed throughout  Georgetown accompany the poetry of Martin  Carter to convey a sense of intense political  reform against poverty, repression and  silence. The film unfolds against the interna  tional backdrop of the 50s: the growth of  foreign economic and military interests in the  Caribbean basin, the coronation of Queen  Elizabeth, the Mau Mau revolts in Kenya, the  Cold War, and the U.S.’ covert wars against  Cuba, Malaysia, Vietnam, Iran and Nigeria.

NIGHT TIME GO (2017) | KARRABING COLLECTIVE, AUSTRALIA, 31’

Night Time Go is an exploration of the settler state’s attempt to remove Indigenous people from their lands during the Second World War using truck, train, and rifle and the refusal of the Karrabing ancestors to be detained. The film begins by hewing closely to the actual historical details of this ancestral journey but slowly turns to an alternative history in which the group inspires a general Indigenous insurrection driving out settlers from the Top End of Australia. Mixing drama and humor, history and satire, Night Time Go pushes subaltern history beyond the bounds of settler propriety.

SONGS FOR EARTH AND FOLK (2013) | CAULEEN SMITH, USA, 10’

Songs for Earth and Folk sings a melancholic tale of disappointment. Folk fail to listen until it’s too late. We End. Cauleen Smith’s Song for Earth and Folk is a found footage film structured like a blues song with a live improvised electro-organic soundtrack created by Chicago-based band The Eternals.

LE BATEAU DE L’EXIL / THE SHIP OF EXILE  (1982) | JOCELYNE SAAB, LEBANON,  FRANCE, 16’  

After living clandestinely in Beirut to escape  Israeli forces, Yasser Arafat, the head of the  Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), left  Lebanon with members of the group aboard  the Greek vessel Atlantis for a new exile  in Greece and then Tunis. The evacuation  was overseen by United Nations Secretary  General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, with the ship  chartered by the Greek Ministry of Merchant  Marines, flying both Greek and UN flags,  a move intended to help assure the safety  of the evacuation, a caution against Israeli  aggression. Arafat talks about his destiny  and the future of Palestine. Le Bateau de  l’exil is an extraordinary historical document. The filmmaker Jocelyne Saab was the only  person with a camera admitted on the boat to  document this journey.