Screening and Conversation
26 October 2024, 1 pm
The Screening Room,  120 Princess St, Kingston, ON

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Event is 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 second program this autumn season curated by guest curator, Nataleah Hunter-Young, and featuring filmmaker, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, who will be joining us for a Q&A moderated by Milka Njoroge.

Open Secret takes its departure from Fred Moten’s words that “poetry investigates new ways for people to get together and do stuff in the open, in secret.” Similarly, cinema’s capacity to condition spaces for gathering, and the double maneuver of opacity and transparency inherent in its making sets the precedent for this sort of investigation embedded in collaboration. This year we embark on a rare opportunity to think through relational entanglements as aesthetic practice inspired by our transdisciplinary network of those working to expand the meaning of diaspora and deepen affinities after October 7, 2023. We now prototype an open curriculum that accesses urgent pedagogical, curatorial and artistic imperatives through the lens of the moving image, new media, film, and time-based work.

With THIS IS NOT A BURIAL, IT’S A RESURRECTION, we learn of the profound connections between land, life, and the familial, taking us on a journey where the relational is made collective and the spiritual is bound by and for the love and protection of one’s land.

THIS IS NOT A BURIAL, IT’S A RESURRECTION
Language: Sesotho | Lesotho, South Africa and Italy | Colour | Flat 1:85:1 | Sound: 5.1 | 120 minutes

Amongst the pythonic mountains of land-locked Lesotho, an 80 year-old widow winds up her earthly affairs, makes arrangements for her burial and prepares to die. But when her village is threatened with forced resettlement due to the construction of a reservoir, she finds a new will to live and ignites a collective spirit of defiance within her community.

Trailer

Biography

Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese is a filmmaker and visual artist hailing from Hlotse, Leriba, Lesotho. His works are a complex investigation of identity and its amorphous quality in relation to time. Indeed, Mosese’s art is a layered exploration of the physical cycles of life, death and rebirth in relation to human subjectivity. A self-taught filmmaker, his feature-length, visual essay film Mother, I am Suffocating, This is My Last Film About You, was selected for Final Cut in Venice, winning six awards. It premiered at the Berlinale Forum in 2019 and continues to be showcased in film festivals and exhibitions, including Moma, BOZAR Brussels, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, and SAVVY Contemporary as a three-channel video installation. Mosese was one of three filmmakers selected for Biennale Cinema College with his first narrative feature film, This Is Not A Burial, It’s A Resurrection, which won over 30 awards, including the Jury Award for Visionary Filmmaking at Sundance Film Festival 2020. The film garnered critical acclaim including glowing reviews in the New York Times and L.A times.

Milka Njoroge is a PhD Candidate in the Gender Studies Department at Queen’s University. Milka’s work examines humanitatian photography and its interplay with race, gender, geography, and nation, with a particular focus on the circulation of images of female circumcision. Her work takes an interdisciplinary lens to understand the interplay between visual and diaspora studies. Milka’s work can be found in Antipode Online and in the Finnish art magazine No Niin. 

Dr Nataleah Hunter-Young (she/they) is a writer, film curator, and Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University. At the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), she is the International Programmer responsible for feature selections from Africa and Arab West Asia. Dr Hunter-Young has supported festival programming at TIFF since 2017, as well as programming for the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and Durban International Film Festival in South Africa. Her research interests span the fields of Black Studies, Cultural Studies, and Media Studies, focusing particularly on Black cultural production, political economy, media industry studies, research-creation, integrated arts and creative practice. Dr Hunter-Young was consulting producer on the Criterion Collection’s 10th anniversary disk release of Dee Rees’ landmark film Pariah (2011) in 2021, and her writing has appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, Criterion Channel, Public: Art | Culture | Ideas, The Conversation, Xtra, and Canadian Art, among other publications. Born and raised in Toronto, Dr Hunter-Young holds a joint Ph.D. in Communication and Culture from York University and Toronto Metropolitan University.

Curated by Nasrin Himada, Associate Curator, Academic Outreach and Community Engagement in partnership with the Department of Gender  and Black Studies.

Supported by the George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, Queen’s University.