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Open Secret x Prismatic Ground

The Screening Room
15 March 2025
7pm

Free and open to all.

Screening
15 March 2025 @ 7pm
The Screening Room, 120 Princess St.

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Open Secret x Prismatic Ground

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

Screening

Woman wearing a head scarf facing away from the camera looking at gravestones in the background

Film still, avant seriana, 2024. Courtesy of artist.

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.

Grainy film still of a coast line with figures of people standing on the shore in the foreground and a boat in the background

Film still, A Stone’s Throw. Courtesy of artist.

All the Days of May (Tous les jours de mai) | Miryam Charles | 2023| 6min

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.

grainy film still of body of water with mountain

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.

Grainy experimental film image

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.

Dimly lit ping pong table outside with people playing

ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong. Film still. Courtesy of Artist

Inney Prakash is a film curator and critic based in New York City. He is the founder and Artistic Director of Prismatic Ground, an experimental festival which will hold its fifth edition in May 2025.

Biographies

Close up of person wearing glasses. They've got short hair and are not smiling

Inney Prakash. Photo 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.

Shadowy portrait of a person with long dark hair sitting at a table with their fist on their temple.

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.

Woman looking down at camera with hair and keffiya hanging in face

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. 

Woman in denim blue dress staring at camera.

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.

Woman with long hair and glasses sitting a picnic table with various objects on it.

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.

Woman with long dark hair in a dark shirt looking intensely at the camera

Daphne Xu. Photo courtesy of artist.

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Footnotes
Image Credits

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