Program Details
Saturday, April 22, 2023
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Curated by Jaclyn Quaresma
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Work by Bani Khoshnoudi, Gautam Valluri, Müge Yildiz, Ufuoma Essi
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Images Festival, Toronto
In Beyond the Last Mirage, Your Absence, four analogue films which have since been digitized by Ufuoma Essi, Gautam Valluri, Müge Yildiz, and Bani Khoshnoudi are presented in an intimate screening at the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC). These four filmmakers formally explore absence through land—and city —scapes to a visually and spiritually haunting effect.
Gautam Valluri explores the relationship between architectural spaces and personal histories through the materiality of celluloid. In ul-Umra, he explores a building popularly known as the Spanish Mosque, commissioned by Viqar-ul-Umra, the Prime Minister of Hyderabad from 1893-1901. Built in the image of Andalusian style, the mosque is said to be unique in all of India.
I Was a Ghost Myself by Müge Yildiz follows the ghost’s trails through a city where the ancient and contemporary entwine. Taking on the guise of an archaeologist, Müge revisits her hometown to face childhood traumas. The ghost, created with a handmade camera filter, haunts the cityscape as the filmmaker wonders if there is cinema after death.
A few years after the Mexican Revolution of 1910, a massive exodus took place within the country, as deportations and violence targeted Chinese and Asian migrants who had settled in Mexico for many decades. With El Chinero, un cerro fantasma, Bani Khoshnoudi asks a question that binds each of the films in this program: Can one fill this memory void with images and artifacts in an attempt to construct an archive where none exists?
The only film of the quartet that is in colour, Ufuoma Essi’s Pastoral Malaise is inspired by Una Marson’s poem Spring In England and Dorris Henderson’s 1965 cover of the British folk song One Morning In May. The film recalls an imagined relationship to the English landscape told through memories and speculative histories of Black women.
Program Schedule
El Chinero, un cerro fantasma (El Chinero, a Phantom Hill), Bani Khoshnoudi.
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE | MEXICO/FRANCE | 2023 | 16 MM >
DIGITAL | 11 MIN | SPANISH AND ENGLISH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES.
Despite a lack of documentation about the hill El Chinero, it is thought that many people died there while crossing the desert from mainland Mexico. This site exemplifies history held within a name. It can be seen, in some ways, as a monument to the memory of those forgotten.
ul-Umra, Gautam Valluri. NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE | FRANCE/INDIA | 2022 | 16 MM > DIGITAL | 8 MIN | NO DIALOGUE.
In 1887, the Hyderabadi nobleman and prime minister Viqarul-Umra commissioned a mosque to be built from his memory of the mosques he saw on a voyage to Andalusia, Spain. This film is an attempt to remember ul-Umra’s mosque through movement and stillness, image and its absence.
I Was a Ghost Myself, Müge Yildiz. NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE | TURKEY | 2022 | SUPER 8 > DIGITAL | 28 MIN | TURKISH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES.
Shot entirely with expired or old stock 8mm film collected by the filmmaker, the footage in I Was a Ghost Myself has either gone blank, gathered texture with age, or is burned, dusty and scratched. The audio, likewise, is a collage of recorded and found sounds intermingled with the wanting monologue of a ghost.
Pastoral Malaise, Ufuoma Essi. NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE | UK | 2022 | 16MM > DIGITAL | 11 MIN | ENGLISH WITH SUBTITLES.
Pastoral Malaise is a reflection on the absences found in rural environments that are often framed by a false romanticism and picturesque conventions, constructed as tourist sites across Britain. The film examines absences and ideas through a Black feminist approach to history and memory.
Jaclyn Quaresma 