Recollections

On March 27, 2025 at 7 pm
— Facebook event

Seats are limited and admission is on a first-come, first-served basis. Please arrive a few minutes early.

For this dv_vd screening, Vidéographe and Dazibao present a program of six short films that explores the capacity of memory, not only to preserve fragments of the past but also to reconstruct and reimagine them. Through the simple act of remembering, memory has the ability to transform what we consider true or real, revealing new perspectives that invite us to rethink — and often heal — our intimate and collective relationships.

The selected works in Recollections embrace this imaginative quality of memory, which can be unsettling yet always fertile, deeply rooted in reality. Here, traces of the past unfold in chimeric ways, exposing the dynamic and ever-evolving relationship between the places, bodies, and stories we inhabit — and that, in turn, inhabit us.

Program — 61 min. 14 sec.

Curators: Mathilde Fauteux & Siam Obregón

Camille Pueyo, Disparitions (2022) — 3 min. 23 sec.

This film reflects on the gender violence suffered by the filmmaker and the impending disappearance of their childhood island. Patriarchal capitalism has forced a retreat from the world and a search for shelter far from their assailants — is there any other choice?

Yuka Sato, Camouflage (2017) — 7 min.

Upon enlarging the picture, a large amount of grain can be discerned. It's like another world or dimension, as if numerous people are moving in a crowd. This film is also about a woman living in a big city.

Chantal Partamian, Traces (2023) — 8 min. 45 sec.

The project explores the cinematic gaze towards queer bodies as well as their constant absence from the recurrent narrative or collective memory. It started with the discovery of 80s pornographic found footage and so we asked ourselves the question, what if this was found in a dilapidated house? What if instead of the process of the image disintegrating, we bring it to life as if the disintegrated lives of queer women that were meant to stay unseen or disfigured or left to rot slowly come to life and assert their presence within the context of the 80s in Lebanon, a period so overtly represented by war and violence and from which all narrative about personal lives and intimacy is removed.

OK Pedersen, Three parables (2020) — 9 min. 21 sec.

Three Parables is a series of tales, told by a family of immigrants, passing the time on their seemingly endless journey west. Dealing with the endless, the infinite, waiting, and questions of God and self, these fragmentary narratives follow and diverge from classical Near Eastern storytelling traditions. The tales and images are cobbled together like dreams, making use of family archival Super8 from 1960s Baghdad, Hi8 from 1980s Chicago, and images captured by the artist in millennial California.

Marik Boudreau, Série-fleuve (1986) — 8 min. 10 sec.

Intimate portraits and images of cities, transformed and reconstructed through various graphic techniques (photocopy, computer, transfers). This video deconstructs the photographic image through the amplification of its graphic characteristics, to the point of abstraction. Marie-Hélène Robert and Marie Trudeau are the composers of the soundtrack.

Andrée Préfontaine, vert 910 (1999) — 6 min.

Starting with a main subject, vert 910 is about childish perceptions that the author still has in her memory. She also looks at modernity with the help of old typical constructions like bungalows, swimming pools…

Laïla Mestari, Comet families (2021) — 7 min. 24 sec.

Comet families combines collage, performance, video and animation to create a surreal universe in which different scales of space and time are entangled. An atonal soundtrack sculpts and sets the rhythm for the slow evolution of this single-channel video in which the artist investigates her geographic and cosmic origins. In excavating hery family archives, the landscape that surrounds her and her corporeal memory, she is attempting to retrace the signs of her ancestral belonging in the world. Musical improvisation and dance enable her to choreograph moving images that evoke the mysterious and living nature of this research.

Charline Dally et Gabrielle Harnois Blouin, dickinsonia. les archives sensibles (2023) — 11 min. 11 sec.

The “dickinsonia” is a 550-million-year-old sea organism whose soft body has left very few fossils. The rare traces of its existence have left the scientific community doubtful. Similarly to this old life form, our oldest memories, blurry and unclassified at the depth of our minds, only seem to leave vague impressions. These visceral stories, written in the flesh but almost inaudible, could resurface. Unexplained and sudden ripples would move through our tissues, shaking us at times, with potentially healing effects.