Endless Acknowledgement
New Red Order | 3 min | 2021

Efforts to “decolonize” institutions are embodied in ritual acts of acknowledging IndigenoUSA presence and claims to territory. However, without continuoUSA commitment to serve as accomplices to IndigenoUSA people, institutional gestures of acknowledgement risk reconciling “settler guilt and complicity” and rescuing “settler futurity”’ How can we escape this entrapment and allow acknowledgement to retain its potential to unsettle? What must we do to begin to undertake a process of endless acknowledgement?

My Name is Kahentiiosta
Alanis Obomsawin | 30 min | 1995 | Canada

Arrested after the 78-day armed standoff during the 1990 Oka crisis, Kahentiiosta, a young Kahnawake Mohawk woman proud of her centuries-old heritage, is detained four days longer than the other women. Her crime? The prosecutor representing the Quebec government will not accept her Indigenous name. From the perspective of Kahentiiosta, we witness the arrest and detention of those who withdrew to the Treatment Centre after the Canadian Army advanced, and we learn why Kahentiiosta was prepared to die to protect the land and trees sacred to the Mohawk people of Kanehsatake.

What is Savage Philosophy?
New Red Order | 4 min | 2021

A video which introduces potential NRO informants and accomplices to the concept of Savage Philosophy™, which asserts that signs have a real and physical connection with things, that signs take part in things instead of taking their place. Savage Philosophy operates through discourse, which is not merely an instrument for the communication of thought, but an occasion for the deployment of forces. If magic confuses representation with reality, savage philosophy makes representation into reality. This introductory video explores Savage Philosophy’s potential to realize Indigenous futures. 

Honour to Senator Murray Sinclair
Alanis Obomsawin | 29 min | 2021 | Canada

As the Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Senator Murray Sinclair was a key figure in raising global awareness of the atrocities of Canada’s residential school system. With determination, wisdom and kindness, Senator Sinclair remains steadfast in his belief that the path to actual reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people requires understanding and accepting the often difficult truths about Canada’s past and present. Alanis Obomsawin shares the powerful speech the Senator gave when he accepted the WFM-Canada World Peace Award, interspersing the heartbreaking testimonies of former students imprisoned at residential schools. The honouring of Senator Sinclair reminds us to honour the lives and legacies of the tens of thousands of Indigenous children taken from their homes and cultures, and leaves us with a profound feeling of hope for a better future.

AlienNATION [star spangled] 
New Red Order | 9 min | 2022 

A welcome as warning, AlienNATION [star spangled], asks viewers if they’ve ever wondered how to be here? How to leave? How to arrive? Then presents an eerie, guilt ridden, yet self-congratulatory stew of televised recordings of public apologies to Indigenous peoples from the heads of state of settler-colonial nations around the globe.

Crianças Fantasmas / Ghost Children
João Vieira Torres | 17 min | 2016 | Brazil, France

Ghost Children, reminiscences of early childhood, read in seven different voices, as the camera presses close against the faded dye and exaggerated grain of family photographs from the early 1980s. Whose faces and memories are those? The film encourages the audience to interrogate assumptions about gender, memory, performance, and death.

A Dark Love Story For Clowns
Crystal Z Campbell | 5 min | 2009 | United States

A Dark Love Story For Clowns is a modern riff on longing, loosely based on a post-abolitionist short story by William Faulkner.

A Dupla Coincidência dos desejos / The Double Coincidence of Desires
João Vieira Torres, Alexandre Melo | 14 min | 2013 | Portugal, France, Brazil

Is the asymmetry of wants the true form of encounter between two people? In this film two men and the sea will maybe have something to say.

Gorilla Means War
Crystal Z Campbell | 19 min | 2017 | United States

A filmic relic of gentrification. Featuring 35mm film salvaged from a now demolished black civil rights theater in Brooklyn, Go-Rilla Means War is a parable weaving intersections of development, cultural preservation, and erasure. 

Bunte Kuh
Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko | 6 min | 2015 | Canada, Germany

Through a flood of images and impressions, a narrator attempts to recall a family holiday. Produced in Berlin and Toronto, Bunte Kuh is a collaboration between Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, and Ryan Ferko which combines a found postcard, family photo album, and original footage to weave together the temporal realities of two separate vacations.

Never Rest/Unrest
Tiffany Sia | 28 min | 2020 | Hong Kong

Never Rest/Unrest is a hand-held short film by Tiffany Sia about the relentless political actions in Hong Kong, spanning early summer to late 2019. The experimental short is an adaptation of the artist’s practice of scaling oral history, of showing political crisis in Hong Kong as ephemeral stories on Instagram for the past year. Never Rest/Unrest takes up the provocation of Julio Garcia Espinosa’s “Imperfect Cinema” on the potential for anti-colonial filmmaking, aiming towards an urgent, process-driven cinema while resisting dominant narratives of crisis pushed by news journalism. Instead, crisis poses ambiguous, anachronistic and often banal time. 

Subtitles are intentionally omitted as a means of interrogating the cultural proximity or distance of the viewer from Hong Kong.

What Rules the Invisible
Tiffany Sia | 10 min | 2022 | United States

What Rules The Invisible is a short film that upturns archival travelogue footage shot in Hong Kong. Spanning reappropriated amateur footage across the 20th century, the sojourner’s gaze—distanced, distorted and even voyeuristic—shows tropes and patterns. The same shots repeat across decades, from landscape to cityscape to street scenes. Sometimes the footage reveals more about the traveler himself, such as a sequence where the camera curiously tracks the hips and bare legs of women wearing cheongsam crossing a busy intersection. Sia’s essay film studies these travelogues to find indignant subjects glaring back at the camera, or figures on the edges of the frame who appear pixelated and phantasmic, showing the patina of the footage’s circulation. Meanwhile, intertitles intermittently punctuate this footage with an oral history of Hong Kong, as told by Sia’s mother who describes colonial police, excrement and hauntings in Kowloon of the postwar era. The viewer is left to imagine these scenes there are no images for.

Chooka
Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko | 21 min | 2018 | Canada, Iran

In 1973, the Shah of Iran commissioned the construction of a paper factory in the lush northern province of Gilan. Foreign engineers from Canada and the United States were brought to develop and run the facility, bringing with them their families as well as a species of pine tree previously unknown to the region. Their stay, however, came to a sudden halt in 1979 with the Iranian revolution forcing them to flee the site overnight. Chooka unfolds between the site of this factory and a rural family house located in a nearby village. Coinciding with the construction of the factory, this family hosted the production of Bahram Beyzaie’s film, The Stranger and The Fog. After the revolution, Beyzaie returned to the same house to produce his film Bashu, The Little Stranger, about a young war refugee who escapes the south and ends up alone in a small northern village.

Wednesday at the Jamaat
Sofía Gallisá Muriente | 11 min | 2017 | Trinidad & Tobago, Puerto Rico

A visual record of the mosque inside the facilities of the Jamaat al Muslimeen and its Madressa, where in 1990 a group of young muslim men planned a coup d’etat to overthrow the government of Trinidad & Tobago. Observing closely the mundane, the political and historic implications of the space are evoked and perturbed. Children and adults pass through the mosque during prayer times, wasp nests rest on cement breeze blocks and the air is filled with the sounds of someone tuning and repairing steel drums in a nearby workshop.

Sol de Campinas
Jessica Sarah Rinland | 27 min | 2021 | Brazil

Sol De Campinas traces the work of archaeologists who, for the past ten years, have been excavating a ring of mounds surrounding a central plaza within a territory currently known as the State of Acre, Brazil. They transition from field to laboratory, interpreting how the land was constructed, what patterns were employed in settlement land use, and the composition of the anthropogenic earth that remains.

Itzcoatl
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos | 5 min | 2014 | Mexico

The scales of the snake refracts trance and invocation. In the epicenter, the pyramids join Izcóatl’s battle, the «Obsidian Serpent» propagates an exhortation: all the dances are against the war.

La Princesa
Sofía Gallisá Muriente | 10 min | 2015 | Puerto Rico

A visual record of the dungeons that survive from what was La Princesa prison; now an office of the Department of Tourism of Puerto Rico. Various groups of tourists that visited on a day like any other are overheard sharing their versions of the history and significance of the place.

After America
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos | 7 min | 2021 | Mexico

These are the western lands of the mind. The western tracks in the land. The western landscapes of our time. The wasted times of our lives. So is the rest of the Capitalocene civilization.

Amisk
Alanis Obomsawin | 40 min | 1977 | Canada

In 1977, the James Bay Festival took place over nine days in Montreal. This historic one-of-a-kind event was held in support of the James Bay Cree whose territory, resources and culture were threatened by the expansion of hydro-electric dams. First Nations, Métis, and Inuit performers came from across North America to show their support in an act of Indigenous unity and solidarity few people in Montreal had ever witnessed. Rarely seen early performances by legendary Indigenous artists Gordon Tootoosis, Tom Jackson, Duke Redbird, Willie Dunn and director Alanis Obomsawin herself are interspersed with testimonies of members of the James Bay Cree. Their stories reveal first-hand experiences of the negative impacts of capitalistic expansion on Cree land.

PERFORMANCE
Em busca de Aurora / In the Search of Aurora
João Vieira Torres | 50 min | 2022 | Brazil, France

The story of a journey among the living and the dead in the heart of Brazil’s desertic Sertão, searching for the sources of violence and love. A collective reading circle where listeners are invited to become tellers.

Celaje / Cloudscape

Ici, là-bas et Lisboa / Here, There, and Lisboa
João Vieira Torres | 19 min | 2012 | France

A visual love poem, an encounter with a city and the thermal prints of one of its inhabitants’ mapped body.  

Celaje / Cloudscape
Sofía Gallisá Muriente | 41 min | 2020 | Puerto Rico

Celaje oscillates between chronicle, dream and document; using nature’s times to interpret human cycles. Combining images filmed on 16mm and Super8, home movies, a found quarter-inch audio tape, old and hand developed film, and an original score by José Iván Lebrón Moreira, this essay film is an elegy to the death of the Puerto Rican colonial project and the sedimentation of disasters in this Caribbean archipelago. Memories move around like clouds, images rot and age, and the traces of the process are visible on the film and in the country, like ghosts.

Mal de Mare / Seasick
João Vieira Torres | 15 min | 2021 | France, Brazil

Seasick is a performance-film that depicts not only the invisible, but those who can’t see. By turning the film into an intervention platform inside an exhibition, echoing a specific question, the question gradually moves beyond the limits of the exhibition and the film itself. It remains to be seen who is interested in the answer. 

The Sun Quartet / Cuarteto Solar 
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos | 2017 | Mexico

• Part 1: Sunstone / Piedra de sol | 7 min 

• Part 2: San Juan River / Río San Juan | 13 min

• Part 3: Conflagration / Conflagración | 16 min

• Part 4: November 2 | Far from Ayotzinapa / 2 de noviembre | Lejos de Ayotzinapa | 22 min

The Sun Quartet is a solar composition in four movements, a political composition in four natural elements, an audiovisual composition in four bodily mutations: a sun stone where youth blooms in protest, a river overflowing the streets, the burning plain rising in the city. And, finally, the clamor of the people that shook Mexico after the night of September 26, 2014. The disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa opened a breach in the Mexican political body.

A Wet Finger in the Air 
Tiffany Sia | 60 min | 2021 | Hong Kong, USA 

A Wet Finger in the Air, (2021), a single-channel video, assembles appropriated footage of bilingual weather reports from 1980s through 1997-era Hong Kong TVB and Pearl broadcasting stations into a hypnotic, randomized loop that repeats every hour. While these reels may invoke a kind of nostalgia, Sia’s interest centers more on locating atmospheric and weather changes as a metaphor for the similarly unpredictable and slippery turns of history. The artist metaphorically raises a wet finger in the air to judge the invisible direction of the times. 

Tierra en trance 
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos | 38 min | 2022 | Mexico 

LEFT SCREEN 

• Irradiación, 2021 | Danza solar, 2021  | Tonalli, 2021 | Piramide erosionada, 2019 | Tlecáxitl, 2021 | El nido del Sol, 2021 Danzas lunares, 2020 | Guerras floridas, 2021 

CENTER SCREEN 

• Copalli, 2022 | Tierra en trance, 2022

RIGHT SCREEN

• Anábasis, 2019 | Memorial, 2019 | Parallax, 2019 | Danzas lunares, 2020 | Altares, 2019

Flight 
Crystal Z Campbell | 24 min | 2021 |USA 

Flourishing Black townships of Oklahoma in the 1920s—an archival record of communities in exile, awash in colors deemed “impossible”. Campbell’s Flight, reconfigures scenes from historical 16mm film footage recorded by Solomon Sir Jones documenting Black communities in Oklahoma to consider the loss of what was and what might have been, as well as the influences and traces left by communities such as Greenwood that are still visible today. For Flight, Campbell shifts the original black and white tones to saturated red and green hues—colors that when combined, according to the opponent theory of color, are “impossible” for our eyes to see simultaneously—affecting the visibility of the images and repositioning analog, archival scenes from a not-too-distant past to a digital present time. 

Notes From Black Wall Street: To Touch With a Lighter Hand 
Crystal Z Campbell | 2021 | USA 

With paint often as thick as scars, this series featuring several large paintings and 100 small paintings imagines ways in which histories are embedded and embodied narratives written upon us. Intricate color patterns loosely extracting from Art Deco (which was used to forge Tulsa’s architectural identity within years of the massacre), alongside color theory, interference patterns, pointillism, and other references work with and against the photographic record, producing at times, histories that are illegible. 

“After finding holes cut in newspapers when trying to conduct research on the massacre, and tiring of images of rubble, I began intervening upon these photographs. Notes from Black Wall Street includes 100 painted photographs to meditate on a century of near silence and omission from the historical record. As a counternarrative to these popularized representations, I expanded this series with several large painted photographs that depict yet to be identified women during the rebuilding of Greenwood. Upon looking at the subjects in these photographs, it was clear that the technology of photography was used to document a period of self-fashioning and self-determination. These photographs were made for the future. Fragments of fired clay are housed within extractions in the archival image, symbolically repurposing what could have remained as shards.”

Give it Back 
New Red Order

In Give it Back, New Red Order engages with moves toward Land Back, which involve calls to restore stolen Indigenous territories to Indigenous people. The project reveals instances where the repatriation of land, from settlers to Indigenous individuals or groups, has been promised or perhaps enacted. Beyond the necessary disruption of settler colonialism with the need to take back land, Give it Back investigates, presents, and promotes another mode of return: through actualized gestures of land being “voluntarily” released to Indigenous people. Employing videos and a real-estate ethos, Give it Back unfolds to chart moments in a speculative future history of the movement.

Linking with NRO’s persistent deconstruction of the idea of an Indigenous informant—a term that describes a person who reveals too much of their own communities, in either legal or anthropological contexts—which involves acknowledging NRO members’ own complicity as informants, Give it Back speculates on the recuperative possibility of calling in others, settlers included, to inform with them. In foregrounding voluntary practices and promises of land’s return, the work offers a potential—if partial—attempt to undo settler colonialism by those who stand to benefit most from its upholding. 

JSR Installation 

The work on view is part of a project centered around a ceramic replica of an elephant’s tusk collected from Malawi in 1900, currently housed at the Natural History Museum in London. Through film, photography, legal documents, organic objects, and text, the project meditates on the tactility of museological and ecological conservation across continents. The resulting fragments invite reflection upon forms of representation, replicas, embodiments, and the materiality of institutions. 

Lluvia con Nieve 
Sofía Gallisá Muriente | 15 min | 2014 | Puerto Rico 

In 1955, Paramount News projected images of a plane landing in Puerto Rico carrying two tons of snow and a family from New Hampshire, and the thousands of young people that welcomed them in a baseball field. These 40 seconds of film, stretched into a 15 minute loop, are possibly the only moving images that survived this event that persists in the conscience of most Puerto Ricans. The piece visualizes the ideological production processes behind these images, manipulating the last cinematic vestige of this moment through editing. The piece is a formal experiment that seeks to penetrate the archive in order to decipher it. The aesthetic practice transforms the film into an anthropological document and derives new knowledge from it, allowing us the opportunity to observe an iconic moment of forced reconciliation between symbols and ideas about our national identity through a political spectacle. The confrontation with these images is like an apparition, in which each frame confirms the occurrence and expands its implications. 

Waban-Aki: People From Where the Sun Rises
Alanis Obomsawin | 75 min | 2006 | Canada

Yvonne M’Sadoques rocks forward in her chair. She’s lived in the Abenaki community of Odanak for over a century­­—and has no shortage of stories to tell.

“The priest would march into our home and order us to stop dancing. We were going to the devil, he said.”  She pauses, a humorous glint in her eye. “But you know—I don’t really believe in the devil. Do you?”

M’Sadoques is in conversation with Alanis Obomsawin, another of Odanak’s proud daughters —and one of Canada’s leading documentary filmmakers.

Obomsawin’s illustrious career comes full circle with Waban-Aki: People from Where the Sun Rises. Having dedicated nearly four decades to chronicling the lives of Canada’s First Nations, she returns to the village where she was raised to craft a lyric account of her own people.

La region mas transparente

La Región más transparente and Izcóatl
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos | 7 min | 2019 | Mexico

Vision of Anahúac: Traveler, you have reached the most transparent region of the air.

Nosferasta
Adam Khalil, Bayley Sweitzer | 32 min | 2022 

Nosferasta: First Bite is a vampire movie like no other. Christopher Columbus uses his undead powers to create his “New World”, where he sucks the blood out of his colonial project for centuries. Complicit in this is Oba—both co-writer and star of the film—a shipwrecked African slave who, once bitten, becomes Columbus’ subject and collaborator. When Oba discovers Rastafarianism, his allegiance changes. A tale as old as time, but filtered through a cloud of smoke.

Do Not Circulate
Tiffany Sia | 17 min | 2021 | Hong Kong

Do Not Circulate, an experimental short film directed by Tiffany Sia, attempts a structuralist and materialist approach to unraveling the entrails of a collective media memory. Paced by an essay as a relentless voiceover, the film rips footage that challenges the materiality, ownership and legal boundaries of documentation. This film contains footage, descriptions and acts that may constitute criminal offences under prevailing laws. The following offence-related material is meant for documentary purposes only. All rights reserved to respective copyright owners. The archival footage spans a single news event in Hong Kong, weaving a violent timeline in roughly the order that the materials were published online, including anonymously uploaded videos from Twitter and internet forums, allegedly leaked audio and news reportage—much of which has since been erased, disavowed or forgotten. A digital media trail teeters between the seeable and unseeable, deception and truth, conjuring ghosts and occult forces on the timeline.

Conversión
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos | 6 min | 2021 | Mexico

Here a double morphology of conversion forces us to think about the trance of non-reconciliation, outburst and trance that go through the centuries of colonial violence until reaching us in the tension of an audiovisual disjunction: visible morphology and enunciable morphology. On the one hand the museum, habitat of barbarism, on the other hand the voice, place and body of the furious testimonial. Religious conversion that conveys communal violence. Archaeological conversion that imposes object immobility, and in the middle an impossible community, the one that remains of the colonial-national centuries.

Viewfinder
Crystal Z Campbell | 19 min | 2020 | Sweden, US

Filmed entirely in Swedish spa town, Viewfinder takes cues from political gestures, and decisive movements to explore belonging, allyship, and monuments.

Pictures of Departure
Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour | 12 min | 2018 | Canada

In winter of 1986 our mother writes in her diary: “To scratch the surface of a subject does not penetrate deep into the subject”. Almost three decades later, Pictures of Departure takes this entry and sets off to explore the surfaces and the scratches that linger across generations.

Revolver 
Crystal Z Campbell | with Angela Bates | 17 min | 2022 | USA

A descendant of Exodusters—African Americans who founded settlements in the American Midwest in the late 19th century—recounts memories, dreams, and visions of her ancestor’s memories.

Hrvoji, Look At You From the Tower
Ryan Ferko | 17 min | 2019 | Canada, Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia

How to resurrect a past that was never one’s own to being with? The possibilities of reincarnation through satanic ritual or synthetic biology offer faint options against a landscape seemingly indifferent to the questions asked of it. Hrovji, Look At You From The Tower materializes in disparate parts of former-Yugoslavia, connected at its ends by an abandoned family farm now only accessible by illegally crossing the border of the European Union. Upon crossing, the film spirals from the perspective of a tower, down into the earth of pre-history and past lives. Through encounters with 1970’s stadium rock, teenage idleness, and amateur archeology opens a hallucinatory state of memory between generations and morphing nations, searching to locate some trace of identity in an increasingly fractured present.

Violence of a Civilization without Secrets
New Red Order | 7 min | 2017 

An urgent reflection on indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and postmortem justice through the case of the “Kennewick Man,” a prehistoric Paleo-American man whose remains were found in Kennewick, Washington, in 1996.

Necropsy of a Harbour Porpoise (Seeing From Our Eyes Into Theirs)
Jessica Sarah Rinland | 11 min | 2015 | UK

A response to Stan Brakhage’s The Act Of Seeing With Ones Own Eyes which creates a blunt statement on the human condition by depicting human autopsies. Necropsy of a Harbour Porpoise (Seeing From Our Eyes Into Theirs) examines the ever-enigmatic whale by revealing its interior, taking away its mystery and disparity, highlighting similarities between seemingly contrasting, expired organisms.

Culture Capture: Terminal Adddition
New Red Order | 7 min | 2019 

As an ongoing colonialist settler regime, the US is a terrain of public secrets, a horror movie cliché of the haunted house built atop an ancient “Indian” burial ground. In Culture Capture: Terminal Adddition, NRO continues their program of “culture capture,” invoking the ghosts of two haunted sites within the settler imaginary: the archive and the monument.

Terminal Adddition highlights the difference between addition and removal. The concept of “removal” is central to current debates about removing problematic historical monuments. It’s also in the name of the Indian Removal Act which resulted in the Trail of Tears. Both present removal as a quick fix. With Terminal Adddition, NRO recognizes that acts of removal inevitably contain contradictions, and provocatively suggests a third possibility: defacement.

Defacement is “unsettling.” Eve Tuck and other theorists employ this pun, likening it to the uncanny, which disturbs because it is strangely familiar. It is a truth that destabilizes the very reality it constitutes. Terminal Adddition likewise enacts a transformative defacement. Its spectral images—uncanny doubles of local monuments—morph, mutate, swell, crystallize, and explode. Having “captured” them, the NRO can manipulate them endlessly, perpetually destabilizing their meaning.

Originally presented as public art in a public plaza in the heart of Syracuse, Terminal Adddition performs a sort of sympathetic magic. The work returns these monuments to art’s most utopian function as a means to wake us from history’s nightmare. However much about haunting, the work ultimately explodes like dynamite, clearing the way for new futures for the living.

Foreign in a Domestic Sense
Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Natalia Lassalle Morillo | 32 min | 2021 | Puerto Rico, United States

Foreign in a Domestic Sense is a constellation of testimonies and imaginaries of Puerto Ricans who have migrated to Central Florida in recent years, conjured by visual artists Natalia Lassalle-Morillo and Sofía Gallisá Muriente. Their images evoke, accompany and connect the lived experiences of people who are part of the fastest-growing Puerto Rican population in the United States, as a result of political and environmental disasters in the archipelago. Just as displacement unsettles space and time, the four channel film layers fictional and non-fictional narrative forms in video and Super8 film, speculating on how community is created through recreation and how cultural hybridity signals to the future. As the ubiquitous presence of water in times of rising tides suggests that Florida will soon become an island, the artists envision a dance floor emerging in the darkness of a swamp, where their subjects become dancers finding each other and learning to move freely.

Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality
New Red Order | 9 min | 2021

Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality morphs monuments into metastasizing flesh via ritualized photogrammetric capture and virtual manipulation, clearing space for Indigenous futures. The piece literalizes the violence of settler-colonial propaganda and features high-profile monuments such as the equestrian Theodore Roosevelt statue which stood in front of AMNH in New York City and End of the Trail, both created by American sculptor James Earle Frasier.  The video mines the archive of  Frasier, going beyond simple iconoclasm to probe deeper, investigating desires for indigeneity that motivated the artist, desires that continue to pervade the myths, dreams, and political foundations of the so-called americas.

Coyolxauhqui
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos | 10 min | 2017 | Mexico

Coyolxauhqui recasts the mythical dismemberment of the Aztec Moon goddess Coyolxauhqui by her brother Huitzilopochtli, the deity of war, the Sun and human sacrifice. The film is a poem of perception, one that unveils how contemporary Mexican femicide is linked to a patriarchal history with roots in deeper cultural constructs. 

The Time that Separates Us
Parastoo Anoushahpour | 34 min | 2022 | Jordan, Palestine

The Time that Separates Us circles an ancient salt-rock formation overlooking the Dead Sea, near Ghor Al-Safi, Jordan. In the process, this Pillar of Salt becomes a portal through which to face the Jordan River Valley, its heavily militarized border and complex infrastructures of tourism, as well as the stigmatized realms of desire, sexuality, and gender encoded within a highly mediated political landscape and its related sites of mythology.

Puerta a Puerta|
Jessica Sarah Rinland and Luís Arnías | 10 min | 2022 | Mexico, Venezuela, USA

A box is filled with the aspirin, tinned peaches, toys, cereal, black beans, facial creams, and used clothes. It is picked up by Sr. Mario at Venus Service Express from a doorstep in Boston, USA. The box is added to a perfect postal tetris, and after a long and arduous journey, eventually arrives in Falcón, Venezuela, at tía Maya’s door.

Toré
João Vieira Torres, Tanawi Xucuru Kariri | 16 min | 2015 | Brazil, France

There is

what I see,

what is shown to me,

what I can’t see,

what I don’t see…

I was invited to film a ritual. One that can be shown to foreigners, to “dried-heads” like me. A child in the village watches Disney’s Fantasia on TV. He is interrupted. What the child lives when he dances? What am I able to see from what is shown to me?

Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another
Jessica Sarah Rinland | 68 min | 2019 | Argentina, UK, Spain

With an elephant’s ivory tusk as the protagonist, Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another meditates upon the endless tactility of museological and ecological conservation, inviting reflection upon forms of representation, replicas, and embodiments of various materials, disciplines, and institutions

Heart of a Mountain
Parastoo Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko, Faraz Anoushahpour | 15 min | 2017 | Taiwan, Canada

In Heart of a Mountain, the chasm between languages is explored through a photograph of a volcanic stone slice in Taiwan. As technology attempts to foster translation and understanding, it also produces new meanings.

Sea – Shipping – Sun
Tiffany Sia, Yuri Pattison | 11 min | 2021 | Hong Kong

How do we reckon with our attachments to place, and their knotted historical relations? A meditation on maritime trade routes, Sea – Shipping – Sun is a short film directed by Tiffany Sia (b. Hong Kong) and Yuri Pattison (b. Dublin) shot over the span of two years to render a simulated duration of a day, beginning at twilight and closing with sunset. The film is set against shipping forecasts from archival BBC radio broadcasts. The sea contains a submerged history. Currents trace trade routes, and also draw a means of escape. While the sea binds communities together, it also disappears and drowns them. An ambient archival broadcast roils over footage of the sea channel traffic, and the sun emerges and disappears, again and again. Inspired by audio and visual media, from lullabies to ASMR videos, created with the intention of inducing sleep or relaxation, Sea – Shipping – Sun gathers a vision of entanglement. We are left with history’s residue: A gentle, rocking waltz over the sea.

A Meditation on Nature in the Absence of an Eclipse
Crystal Z Campbell | 8 min | 2021 | United States

Running like water, an eclipse streams glimpses of irreversible consequence.

Inaate/se
New Red Order | 71 min | 2016 

Inaate/se re-imagines an ancient Ojibway story, the Seven Fires Prophecy, which both predates and predicts first contact with Europeans. A kaleidoscopic experience blending documentary, narrative, and experimental forms,Inaate/se transcends linear colonized history to explore how the prophecy resonates through the generations in their indigenous community within Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. With acute geographic specificity, and grand historical scope, the film fixes its lens between the sacred and the profane to pry open the construction of contemporary indigenous identity. 

Tonalli
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos | 16 min | 2021

Tonalli is a shamanic composition in three parts: an atavistic preparation for a Flower War (Xochiyáoyotl); a solar-lunar ceremonial brazier (Tlecacitl) where Xolotl emerges in his turbulent opacity; finally, a solar irradiation (Tonalli) that manifests in the world as the flowing cosmic blood in which all beings are immersed. A Mesoamerican spell unleashed.