Saturday 23 November
5°C and Broken Clouds
Another milestone: Agnes is closed to the public as we prepare for Agnes Reimagined. Stay tuned for plans for off-site programming!
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Film still, A Stone’s Throw, Razan AlSalah, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Screening
8 March 2025 @ 7pm
The Screening Room, 120 Princess St, Kingston, ON
All events are free and open to all. Register as space is limited.
Open Secret: The Third Edition continues as a series composed of screenings, conversations, and workshops with our third program this season guest curated by Inney Prakash, founder and Artistic Director of Prismatic Ground, an annual festival in New York City centered on experimental documentary and avant-garde film.
A Q&A follows the screening with Prakash in attendance.
Home is a thing we are always giving away
Prismatic Ground presents a program of short works by filmmakers exploring the gaps in their relationships to ancestral homelands, including, in the case of Lindsay McIntyre’s Tukuit— from which this program takes its title— the earth upon which Canada has imposed its borders. From Palestine to Algeria to Haiti to China, the faint outlines of nations dissolve beneath a vivid 16mm overlay of memory and imagination; loss and dislocation give way to psychogeographical chimeras, rendering fine grain into personal visions of here and elsewhere. Rumors of a new regional avant-garde emerge: is the future of cinema in its origins and ours?
Open Secret is curated by Nasrin Himada, Associate Curator, Academic Outreach and Community Engagement.
Supported by the George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, Queen’s University, the Ontario Arts Council and the City of Kingston Arts Fund.
avant seriana | Samy Benammar | 2024 | 19min
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 formed : the Algeria of the mountains and an imaginary one born of the tales I’ve read in colonial archives. My gaze no longer belongs to the places where I was hoping to return to my roots. —Samy Benammar
A Stone’s Throwعلى مرمى حجر | Razan AlSalah | 2024 | 40min
Amine, a Palestinian elder, is exiled twice from land and labour. He is displaced from his birthplace Haifa seeking refuge in Beirut, and again to Zirku Island, for work on an offshore oil platform and work camp in the Arab Gulf. “A Stone’s Throw” trespasses borders to reveal an emotional and material proximity between the extraction of oil and labour in the region and the Zionist colonization of Palestine. The film rehearses a history of the Palestinian resistance when, in 1936, the oil labourers of Haifa blow up a BP pipeline.
Film still, A Stone’s Throw. Courtesy of artist.
Following the shooting of a documentary on the death of her daughter, a mother reflects on her own life and especially on the passing of time.
Film still, All the Days of May (Tous les jours de mai). Courtesy of artist.
Tukuit (Caribou) | Lindsay McIntyre | 2024 | 10min
Created with handmade and manufactured emulsions, Tuktuit explores the close and enduring connections between Inuit, caribou, lichen, and land use. Lichen developers help process the images of a caribou hide being fleshed down to rawhide to make gelatin for handmade emulsion that is subsequently used to shoot the film.
Tukuit (Caribou). Film still. Courtesy of artist.
ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong | Daphne Xu | 2024 | 9 min
The ping pong table at Seward Park in New York City and the in-between space of a Cold War. An immigration lawyer advises on how to tell the truth.
ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong. Film still. Courtesy of Artist
Samy Benammar is a Montreal-based artist and film critic. His work as is conceived as a poetic experiment focusing on socio-political issues rooted in his Algerian and working-class background. His films include avant seriana (2024), kaua’i’o’o (2023) and peugeot pulmonaire (2021). With help from Winnipeg Film Group and Vidéographe, he has screened his films at festivals in Canada and abroad. His writings can be read in various specialized magazines, such as 24 images and Panorama-cinéma on whose editorial boards he sits. He holds a master’s degree in cinema with a research-creation emphasis and is currently doing a PhD examining colonial photography in the Willaya of Batna, Algeria.
Samy Benammar. Courtesy of artist.
Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian artist and teacher based in Tiotiake/Montreal. Her films work with the material aesthetics of appearance and disappearance of indigenous bodies, narratives and histories in colonial image worlds. She often works with sound-images to infiltrate borders that have severed us from the land. Her films are both ghostly trespasses, and seeping ruptures, of the colonial image, that functions as a border, as a wall. She thinks of her creative process as a circle of relations with artists, friends, family, technology, images, plants, objects and sounds…and the unknown. These relations become different points of entry and exit into elsewheres here, where colonialism no longer makes sense.
Razan AlSalah. Photo courtesy of artist.
Miryam Charles is a Canadian-Haitian director, producer and cinematographer. She has produced several short and feature-length fiction films. Her films have been presented at various festivals in Quebec and abroad. In 2022, her first feature film, Cette maison, premiered at the Berlinale, and was named one of Sight and Sound’s best films of the year. That same year, she released the short film Au crépuscule at the Locarno Film Festival.
Miryam Charles. Photo courtesy of artist.
Lindsay McIntyre is a filmmaker and artist of Inuit and settler descent with a process-based analogue practice which deals with themes of portraiture, place, and personal histories. Her film works are a collaboration with material and integrate form and content. Her current project Tuktuit incorporates processing caribou hide to make handmade emulsion. Lindsay is a fellow of Forge Projects (2024), Sundance Institute (2024) and COUSIN Collective (2022). She was honoured with the REVEAL Indigenous Art Award (2017), was named the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award recipient for Excellence in Media Arts by the Canada Council (2013), the CBC Talent Development Award (WIDC 2022), and her short film NIGIQTUQ ᓂᒋᖅᑐᖅ (The South Wind) (2023) won Best Short Live Action Film at imagineNATIVE, Best Female-Directed Short at Whistler, Best Indigenous Film at the Arizona International Film Festival, and is nominated for consideration to the 2025 Academy Awards.
Lindsay McIntyre. Photo courtesy of artist.
Daphne Xu is an artist and filmmaker exploring the politics and poetics of place. She works with lens-based media to untangle image, language, and reality. Her moving image work has screened internationally at festivals including Toronto International Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, and Art of the Real at the Lincoln Center.
Daphne Xu. Photo courtesy of artist.
