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Disappearance in Three Acts | Act One is an ethnography of violence reflecting on a history of conflict in Central Mexico. The video piece posits a decolonial approach to the visual representation of violence in Mexico, transporting us beyond the realm of suffering into a space for quiet contemplation as the violent terrain of occupation enters the frame. Following the pictorial European Romantic landscape tradition with its depiction of the uncontrollable power of nature, this piece is an investigation on enforced disappearance in rural Mexico, reclaiming undermined histories of everyday violence and economic struggle. The video piece appropriates visual motifs from 18th century European Romantic landscape tradition with its depiction of the uncontrollable power of nature and cataclysmic extremes, echoing violent occupation of land in rural Mexico. Through a poignant testimony of a kidnapping survivor, intertwined with the pastoral rural landscapes of her captivity, the video documents geographies of disappearance at the threshold of detectability.

Victor Arroyo is a video artist working in the crossfield between cinema and contemporary art. His films are informed by various modes of listening and seeing, emerging from long periods of observation and documentation. His practice is situated at the intersection between aesthetics, knowledge production and community-based research, often concerned with the encounters and tensions between lived experiences, knowledge regimes and the politics of display. His work is regularly programmed in museums and festivals internationally, including Kasseler Dokfest, Sheffield Doc/Fest, RIDM, Canadian Centre for Architecture CCA, BIENALSUR, Cinemateca de Bogotá, Cinémathèque Québécoise, Cinémathèque Pacific, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe, among others. Born in Mexico in 1977, and based in Montréal, Canada.

In 2012, Mohamed had seen his best friend shot dead by an armed militia on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria; the blood spilled in the lake contaminated his memory. Ten years on, the reflections on the Laurentian waters revive Mohamed's trauma. I ask him if he'd like to dredge up the memories, repair the pain by retreating for a few days to the most distressing calm he can find. He talks about death, immigration and anger. We wonder how and why we should recount this story.

Samy Benammar is a filmmaker, photographer, and art critic based between Montreal and Marseille. Drawing from his Algerian roots and working-class upbringing, his work blends a reflective documentary approach with tactile experimentation. He seeks a form of visual reconciliation while underscoring the irreparable fractures left by fantasies of the past. Often hovering on the edge of disappearance, his images explore the tension between physical and imagined space, between memory, identity, and stone. He has served on the editorial boards of Hors Champ, 24 images, and Panorama-cinéma, and is currently pursuing a PhD on colonial photography in the Aurès region of Algeria.

Public Lighting is a meditation on photography and the creation of images that can capture, replace and outlive our experiences. It`s a videofilm in seven parts.... Each chapter is a case study of the different types of personality that have been identified by the young author who guides us through the prologue. The first, a gay man, takes us on a tour of the bars and restaurants where his affairs have ended, recounting ironic stories of his many lovers. An homage to composer Philip Glass is incongruously followed by Hey Madonna, a confessional letter to the singer from a fan who is HIV positive. Amy celebrates another birthday, but concedes that she has lost her memory to television. At least she has a camera: `I take pictures not to help me remember, but to record my forgetting.` Hiro lives life at a distance, rarely venturing out beyond the lens, and an anxious young model recounts poignant events from her past. Few film-makers use re-appropriated footage in such an emotive way: at once humorous and incisive, these chains of images inevitably lead us back to parts of ourselves. Hoolboom`s recent work is in such profound sympathy with the human condition that it speaks directly to our hearts. -Mark Webber London Film Festival

Mike Hoolboom is a Toronto-based artist working in film and video. He is the author of several books, including Plague Years (1998) and Fringe Film in Canada (2001). He is a founding member of the Pleasure Dome screening collective, and has worked as the artistic director of the Images Festival and the experimental film officer at Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. He has exhibited his work in major festivals including Berlin, Rotterdam, Locarno and Lyon. He has enjoyed retrospectives in eight European cities.

Lensed in Ohio’s Broadview Developmental Center in 1967 by secret camera genius and audio visual healer Jeffrey Paull, Scrapbook tells the story of audacious autistic Donna Washington in her own words, as she encounters pictures of one of her former selves fifty years later.

Born: Korean War, the pill, hydrogen bomb, playboy mansion. 1980s: Film emulsion fetish and diary salvos. Schooling at the Funnel: collective avant-geek cine utopia. 1990s: experimentalist features, transgressive psychodramas, questions of nationalism. 2000s: Seroconversion cyborg (life after death), film-to-video transcode: feature-length-found-footage bios. Fringe media archaeologist: copyleft author 7 books, co/editor 12 books. Curator: 30 programs + www.fringeonline.ca Occasional employments: artistic director Images Fest, fringe distribution Canadian Filmmakers. 80 film/vids, most redacted. 10 features. 70 awards, 15 international retrospectives. 3 lifetime achievement awards. www.mikehoolboom.com

In 1962, Oscar Niemeyer was invited to conceive an international fairground in the city of Tripoli, Lebanon, which was never completed. To Remain in the No Longer looks at how architecture operates in this failed state. By examining the precarity of the project site that remains to this day, the film reflects on the country’s current socio-economic crisis. Employing archival materials, interviews, and 16mm and digital film, the experimental documentary explores the political and cultural forces that have come to bear on the site—from its halted construction to its imposed abandonment and attempted reappropriations. How has architecture been instrumentalized in the ongoing construction of a national narrative? What is the role of architects in shaping society within corrupt ecologies of power and failed financial engineering? Film becomes a plastic medium to reframe the positivism of urban masterplans and architectural monuments and formulate a social critique. Modern structures under threat of collapse stand in as protagonists to tell the story of a promised metropolis that never came to be, while the fairground acts as a lens to look at implicit collapse beyond the perimeter of the site.

Based between Beirut and Amsterdam, artist and filmmaker Joyce Joumaa earned a BFA in Film Studies from Concordia University in Canada. In 2021-2022, Joumaa had her first institutional solo show at the CCA The Canadian Centre for Architecture. Her work has shown at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Fofa Gallery, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial and in the 2024 60th Venice Biennale.

It is hard to navigate in the dark, especially in an unknown territory. Over time, the eyes adjust to the darkness, and the new environment starts to emerge. This video was made during an artist residency at CFS Alert, a military and research station in the high Arctic. CFS Alert is the northernmost settlement in the world, 800 km from the North Pole. From October to early March there is polar night, with no direct sunlight. Most people at the station are there for limited time, on average 3 to 6 months.

Born in Solothurn, Switzerland, Thomas Kneubühler has been living in Canada since 2000. In 2003, he completed a Master?s degree in Studio Arts at Concordia University, Montreal. His work often deals with social issues and how technology is affecting people?s lives. His work has been presented in many exhibitions in both Europe and North America, most recently at the Québec Triennial at the Musée d?art contemporain de Montréal (2011), at the Centre culturel canadien, Paris (2012) and at the Ausstellungsraum Klingental, Basel (2013). In 2011 he was awarded the Pratt & Whitney Canada Prize of the Conseil des arts de Montréal. «Whether it is the ambiguous boundaries of public and private space, the all-pervasive spectre of security surveillance or even the radiant, if dehumanizing, beauty of cityscapes, Kneubühler`s practice tellingly identifies the co-existing insecurities, uncertainties and subtle pleasures embedded in the structures of modern life.» (Bryne McLaughlin, Canadian Art) www.thomaskneubuhler.com

A conference call by investors of a planned iron mine provides the soundtrack for a ride over the land which the company wants to exploit. The land in question is a traditional hunting ground for the Inuit community of Aupaluk, located in Canada's far North. The village has already been relocated in the 1980 and is now again under threat. The term "forward looking statements" is used in the world of investors to describe future events which are subject to certain risks and uncertainties.

Born in Solothurn, Switzerland, Thomas Kneubühler has been living in Canada since 2000. In 2003, he completed a Master’s degree in Studio Arts at Concordia University, Montreal. His work often deals with social issues and how technology is affecting people’s lives. His work has been presented in many exhibitions in both Europe and North America, most recently at the Québec Triennial at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2011), at the Centre culturel canadien, Paris (2012) and at the Centre Pasquart, Bienne (2014). In 2011 he was awarded the Pratt & Whitney Canada Prize of the Conseil des arts de Montréal, and in 2012 the Swiss Art Award by the Ministry of Culture Switzerland. «Whether it is the ambiguous boundaries of public and private space, the all-pervasive spectre of security surveillance or even the radiant, if dehumanizing, beauty of cityscapes, Kneubühler’s practice tellingly identifies the co-existing insecurities, uncertainties and subtle pleasures embedded in the structures of modern life.» (Bryne McLaughlin, Canadian Art)

You cannot pay your bill. – . Your heat and lights are cut off. -. You pay. The clocks initially flash 88:88, –:–. You set the clocks. You cannot pay. -. You pay. 88:88. –:–. Repeat. 88:88, –:–. Cut. -. You stop setting your clock to the time of the world. 88:88, –:– . Subtracted: – : you make do with suspension. 88:88, –:–, -.

Isiah Medina was born in 1991 and he lives in Toronto.

Les pelages bruns, beiges, blancs et noirs se fondent à l’ocre de la terre et des murs inondés de soleil. Calme à l’heure du repos, l’endroit devient assourdissant quand vient le moment de nourrir les bêtes, qui entament alors leur concert d’aboiements. Dans le refuge pour chiens errants d’Agadir au Maroc, plus de 750 animaux trouvent aide et protection en attendant d’être adoptés par une famille. Chaque journée ressemble à la suivante, rythmée par la seule distraction des repas. Avec un regard aussi empathique qu’alerte aux jeux de lumière et de textures, Halima Ouardiri observe la chorégraphie qui régit la vie de la population animale, dont le quotidien suspendu évoque l’attente bien plus tragique de millions d’êtres humains à la recherche d’une terre d’accueil.

Halima Ouardiri est cinéaste. Suisso-Marocaine, elle travaille entre le Canada, le Maroc et la Suisse. Elle a obtenu un B.A. en Science Politique et un B.F.A. en Production filmique à la Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema à Montréal (Canada). Son premier film, "Mokhtar", tourné en Super 16mm, a reçu un très bon accueil dans une centaine de festivals internationaux tels que le TIFF – Toronto International Film Festival (Canada); la Berlinale, Berlin (Allemagne); le Festival international du film de Rotterdam (Pays-Bas); et le Festival international du film de Dubaï (Émirats arabes unis), avant d’être diffusé sur France 3, sur CBC et sur la TSR. Le film a remporté de nombreux prix, dont deux Prix de la Meilleure Réalisation et cinq Prix du Meilleur Film. Tourné dans un petit village du sud du Maroc, le film met en scène les villageois, beaucoup de chèvres et un hibou. De tous les interprètes, seul le hibou est un acteur professionnel. Aujourd’hui, Halima Ouardiri passe au long-métrage avec "Nico", un récit initiatique inspiré de son expérience comme garde du corps à Genève (Suisse), sa ville natale, et avec le développement du scénario de "La Camel Driving School".

Théodolitique (2015) merges the geodetic and the filmic, linking the very long history of land surveying with the comparatively new technologies of film-making. Connecting these two methods of visual observation and recording, Théodolitique documents student surveyors from the école des Métiers du Sud-Ouest-de-Montréal as they take an outdoor exam over the course of a single day. The project utilizes a wide range of filmic and acoustic techniques ? including a parabolic microphone to capture distant audio, and a custom built ?theodocam? to provide a surveyor?s eye view ? to reflect and mimic how the students move, think and learn their trade. Recorded on a designated practice field adjacent to the école des Métiers, Théodolitique is a film that is both chorographic and choreographic.

The works of David K. Ross are concerned with the processes and activities which enable infrastructural monuments, cultural institutions, and architectural structures to exist. Using photography, film and installation to carry out these inquiries, he examines the performative capacities of un-scripted activities, along with the relationships that exist between the recorded event and its re-presentation in physical space. These inquires have been applied to various projects including a study of the enigmatic activities of student land surveyors, the uncanny and oneiric qualities of a series of rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago, the nuanced and poetic movements of dancers about to perform, the mythic and sublime qualities of an urban lighting fixture in Montréal, the quietude of artists’ storage spaces, and a close examination of colour coded art shipping crates.

The Afternoon Knows What the Morning Never Suspected. It is a 3-channel 22-minute work that opens with a brief history of the Vietnam War, assembled from historical documents and footage, and then proceeds to detail Canada's complicity in the conflict, drawing attention to the massive profit that Canadian companies made during this time. The work also references the American draft dodgers who settled in Canada in the late 1960s, creating a context for the connection to today with a mesmerizing drive down Yonge Street in 2017. It is an interesting time to re-examine Canada's self-view in relation to the Vietnam War: yes we took in the draft dodgers (the work makes ample reference to this) but we also profited from the war (in spite of the fact that these profits were strictly against our own laws). The work concludes with the on-screen presence of our two performers, each telling the other's life story: one a first generation Canadian, the child of a Serbian/Croatian marriage; the other born in Canada to Vietnamese immigrant parents.

Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak have worked exclusively in collaboration since 1983, producing videotapes, performances and photo/text works. In 2009, Steele + Tomczak were awarded an Honourary Doctorate by the University of British Columbia (Okanagan); in 2005, a Governor General`s Award for Lifetime Achievement in Visual & Media Arts; in 1994 they received both a Toronto Arts Award and the Bell Canada prize for excellence in Video Art. They are co-founders of Vtape, an award-winning media arts centre established in 1983 in Toronto. Currently Steele is Artistic Director and Tomczak is Restoration and Collections Management Director. Both teach at the University of Toronto in The John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Major public art commissions include: Watertable (2009, and expanded in 2011) a light and sound installation under the Gardiner Expressway (a raised highway) that marks the original shoreline of Lake Ontario at the foot of historic Fort York; …bump in the night (Barrie) (2010) commissioned by McLaren Art Centre and installed in bus shelters; Falling Up (2006) a video work for the Winnipeg Art Gallery; Love Squared (2006) screened on the 2400 square foot video board at Yonge & Dundas Square in Toronto. A major survey of their work, The Long Time: the 21st century work of Steele + Tomczak, curated by Paul Wong (with a 84 page catalogue), opened at On Main Gallery and VIVO, Vancouver, BC in September 2012; the exhibition traveled to A Space Gallery, Toronto, ON (2013), the Art Gallery of Windsor, ON (2016-17), and Dalhousie University Art Gallery, Halifax, NS (2017). Legal Memory, their first feature-length work, has been shown in a number of film festivals since its release including: The Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Festival, the Festival Internazionale Cinema Giovani (Turin, Italy), the Toronto Festival of Festivals and broadcast on TVOntario. In 1996, their work BLOOD RECORDS: written and annotated, received a world premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and toured across Canada with a bi-lingual catalogue published by The Oakville Galleries. Recent solo exhibitions of their works have taken place at Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, (2014); Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal (2011); WHARF Centre D`art contemporain, Herouxville-St. Clair, France (2010); Diaz Contemporary, Toronto (2009); Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, (2009); Dazibao, Montreal (2008); the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris (2003). Selected group exhibitions and screenings of their work include: Every. Now. Then. Reframing Nationhood, Art Gallery of Ontario (2017); Imago Mundi, Instituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere e Arti, Venice, Italy (2017); La Biennale de Montréal, Musee d'art contemporain de Montréal (2014); Carbon 14: Climate is Culture, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (2013); STITCHES: Suzhou Fast Forward, Workshop, Toronto (2011); Empire of Dreams: phenomenology of the built environment at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2010); a focus screening at EXIS: Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul, Korea (2010); the Berlin Film Festival, Forum Expanded (2009); Akbank Sanat, Istanbul (2009); TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) Future Projections (2009); Sophia, Bulgaria at the Central Bath House (2008); a focus screening at Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid (2006); Beyond/In Western New York, organized by Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo (2005); Trivandrum Video Festival, New Delhi (2003); City of York Public Gallery, York, England (2000).

Following the shooting of a documentary on the death of her daughter, a mother reflects on her own life and especially on the passing of time.

From Haitian descent, Miryam Charles is a director, producer and cinematographer living in Montreal. She has produced several short and feature films. She is also the director of several short films. Her films have been presented in various festivals in Quebec and internationally. She has just completed the direction of her first feature film This House. Her work explores themes related to exile and the legacies of colonization.