Shadows Swept Far Away
Monitor 16: Experimental Film + Video Program
Curated by Sameena Siddiqui and Vicky Moufawad-Paul
Featuring short films by Nour Bishouty, Kevin Lee Burton, Beny Kristia, Mahishaa, Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, Chantal Partamian, Tripty Tamang Pakhrin, and Ankur Yadav
Toronto Premiere
Sunday 12 April 2026
Innis Town Hall
5:30pm Doors; 6:00pm Screening
Followed by Q&A and Reception
SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) is thrilled to premiere the 16th iteration of Monitor, its longstanding experimental film and video program, in partnership with Images Festival.
This program approaches experimental cinema as a site where resistance and solidarity are not only represented but actively produced through form. Drawing on critical scholarship that situates ecology as a contested political terrain (Rob Nixon, Anna Tsing) and power as something that governs life and death (Achille Mbembe), the curators bring together eight films that reveal how states, religions, and colonial infrastructures shape bodies, land, and imagination. Non-linear montage, poetic language, and attention to non-human actors disrupt the authority of official histories, replacing them with intimate, fractured, and plural ways of knowing.
Hotels, urban streetcorners, sacred landscapes, and even domestic spaces become politicized witnesses—sites where extraction, displacement, nationalism, and authoritarian control leave their marks, but where care, labour, and memory also persist. By centering Indigenous,
Dalit, diasporic, and subaltern perspectives, the program insists that resistance is not a spectacle but often takes subtle forms: tactile engagement with land, poetic refusal, archival re-stitching, and the reclaiming of ecological and bodily knowledge erased by colonial and state power.
In a time of global turmoil, environmental crisis, and intensifying border regimes, the works in Shadows Swept Far Away mobilize cinema as a practice of solidarity. Experimental form becomes a decolonial gesture, transforming attention, slowness, and fragility into political acts that imagine futures beyond domination, extraction, and dispossession.
ACCESSIBILITY
Wheelchair accessible venue. Closed captioning on all films.
ABOUT MONITOR
Monitor presents experimental short films and videos that initiate dialogue around the shifting nature of politics, economies, and landscapes across the Global South and its diasporas. SAVAC has engaged an international community of artists, curators, and audiences through Monitor since 2005.
ABOUT THE FILMS
Rana Nazzal Hamadeh
Palestine
we would be freer (بنكون اكتر احرار)
2023, 8:41. English and Arabic, with English subtitles.
Through storytelling, this film looks at the sumac plant as medicine, spice, dye, and more. Staghorn sumac is native to parts of Turtle Island and tanner’s sumac to the eastern Mediterranean. Weaving the voices of two women, one from the Mohawk community of Kahnawá:ke and the other an internally displaced refugee in Ramallah, we would be freer invites contemplation on the role of sumac in two occupied lands. Mimicking the progression of the plant’s flowers from yellow to green to red, the film offers a cyclical reflection on connection to land, sustainability, and wild plants.
Nour Bishouty
Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Canada
On the count of three
2024, 13:20. English.
On the count of three imagines a nonspecific hotel as a witness to a full spectrum of human activity. Punctuated with sets of instructional prompts, the film combines archival imagery and staged vignettes that fold fiction and historical narration to blur the lines between care, hospitality, and authoritarian impulses.
Tripty Tamang Pakhrin
Nepal, Hawai’i
Welcome to Hotel Thai
2024, 12:05. Nepali with English subtitles.
Welcome to Hotel Thai observes the daily rhythms of a family-run restaurant and lodge on the Nepal-India border. Through gestures of labor and silence, the film traces the unspoken relationship between the artist’s two mothers, women who share a husband and a home but do not speak. The work moves between memory and observation, language and its limits, to reflect on the endurance and tenderness that persist in the absence of words.
Ankur Yadav
India
‘एक पुराना’ (The Old One)
2023, 10:13. Hindi with English subtitles.
This experimental film weaves visual and textual poetry into a non-linear narrative set in the Aravalli Hills. It captures climatic moments of storms, lightning and regional beliefs such as totka, a ritual to transfer curses, and the local disdain for pigeons as invasive beings. Interlacing myth, ecology, and anatomy through reflections on the human thumb, the film evokes the mystical entanglement between people, nature, and unseen forces.
Kevin Lee Burton
God’s Lake First Nation
HOMe
2024, 02:54. Music: “Variations” by Nicolas Jaar
HOMe is a three-minute experimental video connecting the homoerotic with the land. Exploring gay identity and Indigeneity through photographs and text, this video playfully challenges notions of masculinity within the context of place and land.
Beny Kristia
Indonesia
When The Blues Goes Marching In
2025, 12:40. Indonesian with English subtitles.
A young man narrates the details of his dream from the previous night to his father, entangling the celebration of demonstration, anger, and graduation.
Mahishaa
India
Babasaheb In Bengaluru
2024, 4:46. Kannada and English, with English subtitles.
In Bengaluru, statues of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar—lovingly called Babasaheb—stand as powerful symbols of resistance and equality. Unlike state-funded monuments, these statues exist through the efforts and sacrifices of the people. More than idols, they embody Babasaheb’s call to Educate, Agitate, and Organise, reminding us that his vision of dignity, education, and social justice continues to inspire millions across India.
Chantal Partamian
Canada
Traces / آثار
2023, 8:45.
In the midst of the rubble of a torn building, a reel of film.
An unlikely unraveling of queer bodies taking shape and form, while the war-torn city around and its spectacle of toxic masculinity glitches and disintegrates.
MONITOR 16 GOES ON TOUR!
Interested in hosting a screening of Monitor 16 at your organization? Please contact SAVAC’s artistic director, Abedar Kamgari, at abedar(at)savac.net
ABOUT THE ARTISTS AND CURATORS
Rana Nazzal Hamadeh is a Palestinian artist based between occupied Ramallah and Ottawa on unceded Anishinaabe territory. 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. Her practice is deeply informed by the knowledge emerging from grassroots movements for justice, both in occupied Palestine and across Turtle Island. www.rananazzal.com
Nour Bishouty is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, moving image, works on paper, and artist publishing. Her work attends to fragmentation in history, and the ways knowledge and fantasy are produced and withheld, she explores the limits of articulation, permission, and the generative possibilities of misunderstanding. www.nourbishouty.com
Tripty Tamang Pakhrin is a Nepali artist working across photography, moving image, performance, and installation. Her work grows from her childhood in a hotel-home run by her parents on the Nepal-India border and centers on domestic labor, motherhood, and the boundaries that shape familial relationships. Tripty has exhibited in Nepal, India, Indonesia, Germany, Norway, UAE, and the US. www.triptytamangpakhrin.com
Ankur Yadav is an artist and poet based in Rajasthan, India. Trained as a painter, his practice extends across film, poetry, scenographic installations, and site-specific interventions. His work subverts dominant narratives of exploitative capitalist practices, colonial knowledge systems, and oppressive regional politics and ideologies, which have degraded the environment of his native region. Rooted in grief, anger and loss, both personal and collective, his practice seeks to build alternative perspectives that challenge extractive systems and resist anthropocentric worldviews. www.insituankur.com
Kevin Lee Burton is a director, film festival programmer, offline editor and freelance camera operator who is Swampy Cree from God’s Lake Narrows, Manitoba. In his directorial works he has designed a niche by specifically working in his ancestral tongue, Cree. Kevin was awarded Best Experimental Video and Best Indigenous Language Production for his experimental film NIKAMOWIN (SONG) at the 2007 ImagineNATIVE Film Festival.
Beny Kristia was born in Magelang and moved to Malang to pursue his studies in Communication Science. There, he and his friends in Berakinema produced several films that were featured in national and international festivals. His film When The Blues Goes Marching In is the last film he made before graduating from university. After graduating in 2025, he moved to Jakarta to join Milisifilem Collective to deepen his knowledge of film and art.
Mahishaa is an Ambedkarite filmmaker based in Bangalore. Most of his work focuses on urban Bengaluru. His films navigate intersections of caste, gender and masculinity. He is the founder of Neelavarana, an Ambedkarite artist collective that produces short films, music videos and documentaries focusing on Bahujan stories made by people from the community. His works have been showcased in Australia, Germany, India, and many other places. www.mahishaa.in
Chantal Partamian is an experimental and documentary filmmaker and archivist. Through their work, celluloid, memory, obsolescence, and political imaginaries merge to reflect on erasure, denial, repetition and blur. Chantal’s work has been presented and awarded at multiple festivals in Germany, Canada, Lebanon, Armenia as well as France, Egypt and Croatia. Chantal is based in Canada. www.chantalpartamian.com
Sameena Siddiqui is a doctoral candidate in Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia. Her research, writing, and curatorial practice engage with vernacular modernisms, photography, histories of science and technology, and digital cultures through decolonial feminist and intersectional frameworks of resistance and collective care, foregrounding labour, caste, migration, and imperial infrastructures.
Vicky Moufawad-Paul is the Director and Curator at A Space Gallery in Toronto. She situates her work in terms of curatorial praxis which investigates aesthetic strategies for South West Asian self-determination, including counter archives, opacity, and refusal. Her writing and curating has been supported by numerous festivals, galleries and publications.
Images Festival is a non-profit, artist-led festival dedicated to experimental film, media arts, contemporary art, and the spaces in which these forms coexist.
