Event Details
May 29, 2022
12:00 pm EDT
Paradise Theatre, 1006 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON, M6H 1M2
Join us for a screening of Canadian short films followed by a panel discussion around opportunities and challenges making films in Canada and beyond.
Screenings:
Brown Bread & Apricots
Country: Jordan, Canada
Director: Serene Husni
Length: 8 mins
Synopsis: In the absence of his parents, an unruly teenager is presented with a crucial test of character devised by his eldest sister. Instead of being punished for skipping school, he is entrusted with managing the family allowance for two weeks. To feed his siblings, he resorts to something he knew in his heart: in a Palestinian house, the pantry is never bare. Borrowing from classic elements of Palestinian storytelling—namely repetition, trickery, and an obsession with food—Brown Bread & Apricots is a story about a Palestinian family in exile.
Visions of Basra
Country: Canada
Director: Noor Gatih
Length: 5 mins
Synopsis: Visions of Basra explores my mother’s fragmented memories of her homeland by exploring her photographs, colours and words. Each moving visual appears to be imperfect or out of focus the more detailed her recollections become.
Nur El Qulub//نورالقلوب
Country: Canada
Director: Sawsan Alsaraf
Length: 8 mins
Synopsis: Nur Al Qulub is an exploration of the spiritual dimension of shadow and light. Drawing from the director’s experiences as the end-of-life support person for many near and dear people in her life, this project seeks to ask questions about spiritual truth, transitions, and the unknown. Dwelling on the threshold of spaces of darkness leading to the light, shadow work and discomfort, and the material and the spiritual, Nur Al Qulub references AlSaraf’s deepest realizations around the meaning of life – and death.
Don’t Forget The Water
Country: Canada
Director: Christina Hajjar
Length: 5 mins
Synopsis: A phone conversation sets the diasporic table as a disembodied figure prepares Qahwah Arabi / Arabic Coffee. Here, the contradictions inherent in Google Translate’s instant camera feature are made visible through glitched mistranslations. Using these flaws as a prompt, the communication between a mother and a daughter considers ambiguity as a source of embodied knowledge.
Festina Lente
Country: Canada
Director: Baya Medhaffar
Length: 21 mins
Synopsis: Combining two contradictory terms in a single phrase is called an oxymoron. Circumventing the obvious, shaking up the logic, proceeding in gusts, claiming the impossible, such is the method that Baya Medhaffar has chosen and, adopting an ancient motto, she makes it clear right from the title: “Make haste slowly”. There are several explanations for this speed proclaimed yet slowed all at once. Her film is mostly made of edited, assembled images from other films; thus, all the emergencies from other works reach a climax here, but as they overlap, they also call for their patient and detailed examination. The dishevelled editing is combined to a superimposition technique that makes scales collide, that associate separated figures and backgrounds, and that ties together in the same frame seemingly unrelated dynamics and lines of forces.
Panel:
Canadian Filmmakers Roundtable
Through this discussion, filmmakers will reflect on their creative journeys, opportunities and challenges making films in Canada and beyond.
Moderator:
Nashwa Lina Khan, Community Educator, Facilitator, and Researcher
Nashwa Lina Khan is a community educator, facilitator, and researcher. She is also a writer and poet and occasionally dabbles in installation and archive that uses narrative methodologies. She holds a Masters of Environmental Studies from York University with areas of concentration focused on narrative methodologies, community and public health, refugee, and forced migration studies and is currently a PhD student at York University in Environment and Urban Change. Her work has been published in a variety of places including Vice, Rewire, This Magazine, and The New York Times. She is the host and producer of two podcasts, Muslim Rumspringa and Habibti Please.
Speakers:
Sawsan Al Saraf, Filmmaker
Sawsan AlSaraf (Canadian, b. Iraq) is a visual and multimedia artist who lives and works in Montreal, Canada, AlSaraf has moved between the Middle East and North America since 1977. In her work, she draws her references from her life experiences as an expatriate Iraqi woman. She holds a BFA in Studio Arts rom Concordia University in Montreal, Canada and an MFA in Visual Arts from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Noor Gatih, Filmmaker
Noor Gatih is an Iraqi filmmaker and photographer based in Toronto. Her practice explores gender and generational patterns within family archives, film, and photography, and her work has been exhibited at Collusion Books, Gallery 44, Wave Art Collective and Gallery 1265. Recently, she was selected for a 2021 mentorship opportunity at Made In Her Image (hosted by Panavision), an organization that provides training and resources for women of colour pursuing a career in film production.
Christina Hajjar, Filmmaker
Christina Hajjar is a Lebanese artist, writer, and cultural worker based in Winnipeg on Treaty 1 Territory. Her practice considers intergenerational inheritance, domesticity, and place through diaspora, body archives, and cultural iconography. As a queer femme and first-generation subject, she is invested in the poetics of process, translation, and collaborative labour. Her work involves photography, film, performance, installation, publishing, and curation.
Hajjar was a recipient of the 2020 PLATFORM Photography Award and received an honourable mention for the 2021 Emerging Digital Artists Award. Her film Don’t Forget the Water won the Jury Award and the Audience Choice Award for Best Manitoba Short Film at Gimli Film Festival. Hajjar curates the SWANA Film Festival, presenting South West Asian and North African short films from around the world.
Hajjar is a Managing Editor of Carnation Zine (publishing art and writing on diaspora and displacement) and qumra journal (publishing reflections on world cinema). She is senior editor of Herizons (Canada’s foremost feminist magazine). She is the creator of Diaspora Daughter, Diaspora Dyke zine, which won Best Artzine at the Broken Pencil Zine Awards. Her writing has appeared in BlackFlash Magazine, C Magazine, The Uniter, CV2, Prairie Fire, and PaperWait.
Serene Husni, Filmmaker
Serene Husni is a documentarian, mentor, and Arabic-English translator. She holds an MFA in Documentary Media awarded with distinction from the Toronto Metropolitan University, and her directorial debut, “Zinco” (2013) won the “Audience Award for Best Short Documentary” from the Franco-Arab Film Festival. Her short, “Brown Bread & Apricots” (2021) won the Qayqub Award for “Best Canadian Short Film” from the Toronto Arab Film Festival. She is a co-writer and co-editor of the feature documentary “Eulogy for The Dead Sea” (2022), directed by Polina Teif, which traces the environmental impacts of settler colonialism on the disappearing body of water and the communities that live around it. She is currently in post production on her first feature documentary, a city symphony in four movements, titled “Jenin & the Colony”.