XINEMA and Gallery Gachet are proud to present Home is an Artifact, a two-part screening of experimental films by local and international artists. These reflective works flow between fragments of memory across individual and collective landscapes, forming new frameworks for reconciling identity,
embodiment, and place.
Part one showcases four new works collectively entitled To Map Alongside Belonging. Over eight months, a cohort of local BIPOC artists Kaila Bhullar, Luis Andrés Serrano, Monica Cheema and Ogheneofegor Obuwoma drew from their individual experiences to consider the intersections of personal and communal, and respond to Gallery Gachet’s positionality within the Downtown Eastside. The films in this programme are conscious vessels that respond, manipulate, and contribute to an ever growing archive of intergenerational and diasporic stories.
Curated by XINEMA, part two responds to the work of Gallery Gachet’s cohort, and features three experimental works by filmmakers Nada El-Omari, Martin Molina Gola, and Rhayne Vermette. Each artist combines uniquely manipulated analogue, digital, and archival images into rites of remembering; codices
for (re)discovering personal histories, identities, and sites of becoming.
Part One:
Homebody
Luis Andrés Serrano (Canada, 2024), 9 min
Assuming the role of a disembodied scientist, the filmmaker playfully interacts with fragments of a house as its own being. Showcasing the home in Petri dishes, Homebody documents breaking down and growing elements of a contained domestic space.
geographies of longing
Ogheneofegor Obuwoma (Canada, 2024), 6 min
An exploration of body mapping as a way of traversing borders and experiences to exist in multiple places at once. geographies of longing archives the filmmaker’s homes and life across continents, acting as a portrait and as an invitation to navigate alongside.
Birth, Death + Entertainment
Kaila Bhullar (Canada, 2024), 6 min
An audiovisual collage incorporating recorded and found footage, altered super 8 film, still images, and digital manipulations. Birth, Death + Entertainment explores the intersectionality of a queer and neurodivergent identity and its subsequent correlations to existential dread.
Let Us Try Again (Ao Phir Koshish Kariye)
Monica Cheema (Canada, 2024), 6 min
A rumination on the personal and colonial histories embedded within landscapes. Let Us Try Again (Ao Phir Koshish Kariye) is a curious attempt to begin tracing family histories in relation to railway work, offering a window into personal and collective grief, loss, and memory.
Total part one program time: 27 min + filmmaker Q&A
Q&A with filmmakers from Part 1
15 MIN INTERMISSION
Part Two:
YAGÉ
Martín Molina Gola (Mexico/Peru, 2021), 14 min
This travel journal from Peru works with the question of memory via the degeneration of video images, exploring hallucinatory space constructed from visual and aural debris. The passage of time and the nature of images are deformed mirrors of reality in this visual leitmotif.
Yaffa
Nada El-Omari (Canada, 2019), 8 min
Space and time become meshed together to form the fragments we create our stories from. In those pieces of images, memories arise and stories retell themselves. Through mutual time, words, explorations and spaces Yaffa realizes a grandfather’s gift: a home.
Les Châssis de Lourdes
Rhayne Vermette (Canada, 2016), 18 min
An architectural threnody is composed through various “true stories” and the inherent struggle between the metaphysical and material.
Total part two program time: 40 min
XINEMA is an ongoing series that showcases emerging and established filmmakers within and beyond “Vancouver”, BC to strengthen and preserve the experimental film scene. www.xinema.ca
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