— 4 min 25 s

An experimental short and installation work that combines text and film to explore the simple desire to travel, through the cultural and political realities of being Palestinian. Soundtracked with the anxiety of disposition, the work opts to show a close-up of text being typed and edited on word-processing software, the work complicates a simple desire to travel by adding to it the social, cultural and political realities of being a Palestinian on Indigenous land in Turtle Island. 

Muhammad Nour Elkhairy is a Palestinian filmmaker, video artist, and film programmer from Jordan, currently based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). ElKhairy holds a MFA in Studio Arts: Film Production at Concordia University.  His experimental fiction and non-fiction video works are particularly concerned with the legacies of colonial, political and economic power. Intrinsic to his work is the desire to highlight the screen not only as an ideological apparatus but also as a surface onto which the performed self exists between the interiority of the personal and the exteriority of the sociopolitical. His work has been shown in several international film festivals and art galleries including Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Kaunas International Film Festival, Toronto Palestine Film Festival and the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery.

— 8 min. 4 sec.

I walk on snow to fall onto the desert. I find myself on unceded Indigenous territory in so-called Canada, an exile unable to return to Palestine. I trespass the colonial border as a digital spectre floating through Ayalon-Canada Park, transplanted over three Palestinian villages razed by the Israeli occupation in 1967. 

Canada Park is an experimental video poem exploring the politics of dis/appearance of Palestine as narrativized, mapped and imaged in Google Street View and early 20th century colonial landscape photography of the ‘Holy Land’, namely at the site of the village of Imwas which is theologically conflated with Emmaus, a village cited in the bible. Imwas is erased and Emmaus marked a religious touristic site in the park, a self-fulfilled scriptural and algorithmic prophecy.

The park is located between what is commonly known as No Man’s Land and Jerusalem. The film explores this absurd space of suspension to create a counter mythology of this place against the religious, geopolitical and capitalist forces that actuated their imaginings on Palestine, people and land by reinserting the few images documenting the March of Return to Latroun that took place on June 16, 2007. Imwas is not erased. It is buried underground, an undercommons, an elsewhere here, where colonialism no longer makes sense.

I wake up again, feet on the ground in so-called Canada; another park, Iroquois Mohawk territory. I walk on snow to fall unto the desert.

Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian artist and teacher based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. 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.

— 11 min. 34 sec. (Lebanon/Canada)

A more ambient work of many things, including orchids blooming, and plants growing, superimposed over raw footage from post massacre filmings of the 1982 massacre at Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon. Cloud footage, Hubble space imagery, the visible body crosscuts, and abstract shots of slow motion water, add to this reflection of the past, its present context and genocidal trajectory. With the voice over of Abdel Majid Fadl Ali Hassan (a 1948 refugee living in Bourg El Barajneh camp) recounting a story told by the rubble of his home in Palestine, and the collection of audio accompanying the clips, the tape permeates into an intense essay on dystopia in contemporary times. Working directly, viscerally, and metaphorically the videotape provides an elegiac response to the ongoing Palestinian dispossession.

Jayce Salloum tends to go only where he is invited or where there is an intrinsic affinity, his projects being rooted in an intimate engagement with place. A grandson of Syrian or Lebanese immigrants, he was born and raised on others’ land, the Sylix (Okanagan) territory. After years of living elsewheres he planted himself on the unceded stolen lands of the xʷməθkʷey̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and səíl̓wətaʔł. Recognizing and acting on this is an everyday practice, but let’s face it, he could do a lot more. In/out of this context not that it really matters, Salloum has lectured, published and exhibited pervasively at the widest range of local and international venues possible and most improbable, from the smallest unnamed storefronts in his downtown eastside Vancouver neighbourhood to institutions such as the Musée du Louvre, Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, National Gallery of Canada, The Havana Biennial, Sharjah Biennial, Biennale of Sydney and the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

— 9 min. 45 sec.

An urgent reflection on Indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and postmortem justice through the case of the "Kennewick Man," a prehistoric Paleo-American man whose remains were found in Kennewick, Washington, in 1996.

Adam Khalil (Ojibway) is a filmmaker and artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. His practice attempts to subvert traditional forms of ethnography through humor, relation, and transgression. Khalil’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Film Festival, Walker Art Center, Lincoln Center, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among other institutions. Khalil is the recipient of various fellowships and grants, including but not limited to: Sundance Art of Nonfiction, Sundance Institute Indigenous Program, UnionDocs Collaborative Fellowship, and Gates Millennium Scholars Program. Khalil received his BA from Bard College.

Zack Khalil (Ojibway) is a filmmaker and artist from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, currently based in Brooklyn. His work often explores an indigenous worldview and undermines traditional forms of historical authority through the excavation of alternative histories and the use of innovative documentary forms. He recently completed a B.A. at Bard College in the Film and Electronic Arts Department, and is a UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow and Gates Millennium Scholar.

Jackson Polys is a multi-disciplinary artist belonging to Tlingit territory, living and working between what are currently called Alaska and New York. He holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University (2015) and was the recipient of a 2017 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Mentor Artist Fellowship. He is a core contributor to New Red Order (NRO), a public secret society that, with an interdisciplinary network of Informants, co-produces video, performance, and installation works that confront desires for indigeneity, settler-colonial tendencies and obstacles to Indigenous growth and agency. His individual and collaborative works have appeared at the Alaska State Museum, Anchorage Museum, Artists Space, Burke Museum, e-flux, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Images Festival, MIT, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Modern Art, New York Film Festival, Park Avenue Armory, Sundance Film Festival, UnionDocs, Toronto Biennial of Art, Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, including the Whitney Biennial 2019, among other institutions.

— 7 min.

Something from there is a short film on the substance of our original lands. How does connection to land change after uprooting and in diaspora? How does matter embody memories and defy official histories? These are some of the open-ended questions asked in this reflection on the complicated implications of wanting a piece of land after displacement. Weaving between the voices of the artist’s parents, one a refugee and the other not, the film is personal, yet evokes a shared Palestinian experience. A fragmented story of the artist’s father’s exile from Palestine in 1948 is the guiding narrative. As he explains, he has not returned since — but for a single day in the sixties. Her mother, on the other hand, grew up in and has lived in Palestine for much of her life (her contribution to the film was recorded over Zoom while she sat on a patio in her hometown). Although her story is not the focus, it becomes clear that she is able to return and collect the “something from there” referred to. The “something” is never named, though it is the center of the narrative. Is it the soil? A piece of land? The remains of our ancestors? The distinction between land and body is not made, and rather Something from there focuses on the power of memory and material to revive a denied homeland and counter the settler colonial impetus to erase any assertion of Indigenous life. 

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh is a Palestinian artist based on Algonquin Anishinaabe land. Her photography, film, and installation works look at issues related to time, space, land, and movement, offering interventions rooted in a decolonial framework and using memory and story to engage intimately with broad concepts. Her practice is informed by the knowledge emerging from grassroots movements, both in occupied Palestine and across Turtle Island. Nazzal Hamadeh holds an MFA in Documentary Media from Toronto Metropolitan University and is based between occupied Ramallah and Ottawa.

— 7 min.

Yaffa is a short experimental film in which 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. It is through our mutual time, words, explorations and spaces that I realized my grandfather gifted me a home.

Nada El-Omari is a filmmaker and writer of Palestinian and Egyptian origin based in Montréal. Her practice and research interests centre on the intergenerational transmissions of memories, displacement, and the stories of belonging and identity which she explores through a poetic, hybrid lens. Focusing on process and fragments in text, sound, and image, Nada explores new ways to self-narrate, and speak hybridity and self. El-Omari holds a BFA in Film Production and an MFA in Film from York University.

— 1 min.

Wild rice is an important source of food and revenue for many Anishinaabe people, who sometimes travel hundreds of kilometres to harvest the grain in the region around Kenora, Ontario. Directed by Alanis Obomsawin as part of the Canada Vignettes series.

One of the most acclaimed Indigenous directors in the world, Alanis Obomsawin came to cinema from performance and storytelling. Hired by the NFB as a consultant in 1967, she has created an extraordinary body of work—50 films and counting—including landmark documentaries like Incident at Restigouche (1984) and Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993). The Abenaki director has received numerous international honours and her work was showcased in a 2008 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. “My main interest all my life has been education,” says Obomsawin, “because that’s where you develop yourself, where you learn to hate, or to love.”

— 1 min.

The farming practices of residents of the Líl̓wat Nation near Mount Currie, B.C., are presented in a series of snapshots that illustrate the fertility of their territory and the people’s deep connection to their land. This short is part of the L’il’wata series. In the early 1970s, at the outset of her documentary career, Alanis Obomsawin visited the Líl̓wat Nation, an Interior Salish First Nation in British Columbia, and created a series of shorts that provide personal narratives about Líl̓wat culture, histories and knowledge.

One of the most acclaimed Indigenous directors in the world, Alanis Obomsawin came to cinema from performance and storytelling. Hired by the NFB as a consultant in 1967, she has created an extraordinary body of work—50 films and counting—including landmark documentaries like Incident at Restigouche (1984) and Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993). The Abenaki director has received numerous international honours and her work was showcased in a 2008 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. “My main interest all my life has been education,” says Obomsawin, “because that’s where you develop yourself, where you learn to hate, or to love.”

— 8 min. 28 sec.

This video is part of the multimedia installation Driving in Palestine which combines photography, video, printed matter, and sound to offer glimpses of Israel’s structures of segregation, confinement, surveillance and restriction to freedom of movement that proliferate the occupied West Bank. Captured from moving vehicles on Palestinian roads spanning 2010 to 2020, a decade of images compels viewers to question the link between suppression and debilitation of Indigenous people and the attempts to expropriate and destroy their land. 

Rehab Nazzal is a Palestinian-born multidisciplinary artist based in Montréal and Bethlehem, Palestine. Her work deals with the effects of settler-colonial violence on the bodies and minds of colonized peoples, on the land and on other non-human life. Nazzal’s video, photography and sound works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Canada and internationally. Nazzal is currently an assistant professor at Dar Al-Kalima University in Bethlehem and has taught at Simon Fraser University, Western University and Ottawa School of Art. She is a recipient of multiple awards in Canada and internationally.

— 4 min.

Accompanied by a song in the Lil̓wat7úl language, we follow a woman as she makes gwùshum, a Stl’atl’imx (Líl̓wat) dessert and a very special treat. From the harvesting of the xúsum (soapberries or salmonberries) to the construction of the corn-husk whisk, a dish is created that is equal measures mouthwatering and awe-inspiring.  

This short is part of the L’il’wata series. In the early 1970s, at the outset of her documentary career, Alanis Obomsawin visited the Stl’atl’imx (Líl̓wat) Nation, an Interior Salish First Nation in British Columbia, and created a series of shorts that provide personal narratives about their culture, histories and knowledge.

One of the most acclaimed Indigenous directors in the world, Alanis Obomsawin came to cinema from performance and storytelling. Hired by the NFB as a consultant in 1967, she has created an extraordinary body of work—50 films and counting—including landmark documentaries like Incident at Restigouche (1984) and Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993). The Abenaki director has received numerous international honours and her work was showcased in a 2008 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. “My main interest all my life has been education,” says Obomsawin, “because that’s where you develop yourself, where you learn to hate, or to love.”

— 13 min.

Reclamation is a documentary-style imagining of a post-dystopic future in Canada after massive climate change, wars, pollution, and the after-effects of the large scale colonial project which has now destroyed the land. When Indigenous people are left behind after a massive exodus by primarily privileged White settlers who have moved to Mars, the original inhabitants of this land cope by trying to restore and rehabilitate the beautiful country they feel they belong to. Complicated by the need to look after southern climate refugees, this post-dystopic society struggles to reinvent itself as a more healthy community, with opportunities for healing from shared trauma, and using traditional Indigenous scientific knowledge to reclaim Canada environmentally.

Indigenous people demonstrate the jobs they are doing to heal Canada, the Earth, and themselves, like clean water projects, gathering litter, disposing safely of hazardous wastes, planting trees, conducting healing circles and ceremonies, playing together, and having discussions about what it feels like to be left behind on what was seen by White settlers as a dying, disposable, planet.