Of Differences, Lineages, and Belongings
Friday, November 6th - 6:00 pm EST
ONLINE
This program will be available to view for one week (November 6th, 6:00 PM - November 13th, 5:00 PM).
Duration: 1 hour 5 mins
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*ALL FILMS WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES*
Regular screenings are restricted to those 18 years of age or older according to the Ontario Theatres Act.
A correlation of feminist forces that are constantly structured and restructured. An incessant becoming (transformation).
Video, celluloid and performance become resilient matter, shaped by the sensibility of eleven Latin American women artists and filmmakers who interweave, disorder and alter their elements. In these thirteen works, they invite us to doubt through image and sound, question what they represent, and look beyond their surface.
Through performance, animations, a letter, found footage, and music video, this program's works celebrate the political questioning from a constitutive OTHER within a HETEROGENEOUS field.
HETERO questions from/of the other, from the difference
GEN brings to light, origin lineage
EO belonging
The body is central to convey tactile memories encoded in affects, the touch, and smell more than vision, an invitation to look together, and touch together from the perspectives of multiple differences.
Curated by Alexandra Gelis
Alexandra Gelis is a Colombian-Venezuelan media artist based in Toronto with a background in visual arts. She is a PhD candidate in Environmental Studies at York University, she also holds an MFA degree from the same university, Toronto, Canada. Her work predominantly involves photography, video, electronic and digital processes. Gelis’ work addresses the use of image in relation to displacement, landscape and politics beyond borders or culturally specific subjects. In her latest works she has expanded her practice using electronics and programming for interactivity.
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jeny303
Laura Huertas Millán
2018 - Colombia - 6 mins - Experimental
Toronto Premiere
Montreal International Documentary Festival
New York Film Festival
Festival Internacional de cine de Mar del Plata
Houston Cinema Arts Festival
Mediacity Film Festival
Born out of an "objective hazard" (a 16mm roll where two different subjects were imprinted by mistake), jeny303 is a composite work intertwining two portraits. On the one hand there is jeny, the feminine alterego of a transgender millennial dealing with heroin addiction. On the other hand there is the 303 building, an iconic modernist architecture in a public university in Bogota (Colombia). The images of the body and the edifice interlace and depict jeny303, a character on the threshold of a transformation to come.
Correspondencia / Correspondence
Valentina Alvarado Mato
2020 - Venezuela - 3 mins
World Premiere
Correspondence is part of a series of letters that I sent myself and Nalzi Dincel as part of a project called La Casa Encendida (House on fire). In this first letter, I confronted myself filming in the midst of the pandemic: mostly domestic acts and caring for the house. I traced playful paths where green, in my days, became predominant, and I look for relations within all these elements: to plant, to learn, to cultivate.
Santos Zapatistas
Viviana Díaz
2005 - Colombia - 4 mins - Animation
Santos Zapatistas is a video that tries to transmit the pacifist spirit of the Zapatista people and their struggle for the indigenous rights of equality, justice and dignity. The video shows the hope of a people to make a better world and was made with the feeling of solidarity to their cause in 2004, and now, in 2020, it’s still more relevant than ever. Made with a collage of indigenous photos from Chiapas and fragments of the voice of Subcomandante Marcos, spokesman for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), and original music by Mexican composer Rodrigo Castellanos.
Salar la tierra / Salting the Earth
Julieta Maria
2018 - Colombia - 5 mins
North American Premiere
Bogota Experimental Film Festival
On a field in front of a church, a performance takes place. The performance, a woman walking into this field, is suspended and repeated in a series of shots, creating temporal and spatial displacements. The site is El Salado, a small town in Bolivar, Colombia. In 2000, there was a massacre of nearly 100 people by paramilitary groups; villagers were held in the church. El Salado was subsequently abandoned, with some townspeople returning a few years after the massacre.
Amérika
Ana Vaz
2016 - Brazil - 9 mins
Toronto Premiere
Mediacity Film Festival
It is said that, in the year of 1492, the first European ship led by Christopher Columbus disembarked on the coast of Samaná, present-day Dominican Republic, and was received by a rain of arrows carefully plotted by the Caribbean Taíno. Presently, a saline lake named after the Taíno chief Enriquillo witnesses profound eco-systemic changes leading to species migration, forced evacuation and an expanding coral desert revealing the lake’s geologic past. Taking the camera itself as an arrow, a foreign body, Amérika: Bay of Arrows looks for ways in which to animate, to awaken, to make vibrate again this gesture in the present - arrows against a perpetual “falling sky.”
Aí
Valentina Alvarado Mato
2019 - Venezuela - 3 mins
World Premiere
In AÍ, I propose different ways of relating to the territory. To do this, I go through the space, I explore it and I display a flag on one of the mounds that make it up - a matter of previous occupations. The flag has a textural pattern with the words country - root. The sound, an echo of this word becomes a mantra.
Plata o Plomo
Nadia Granados
2020 - Colombia - 4 mins
World Premiere
The statement "silver or lead" is one of the most internationalized quotes of the Pablo Escobar brand. From there, a huge range of products are produced, a profitable variety of souvenirs that allow consumers to come into advertising contact with one of the figures with the greatest international projection in Colombia. This phrase became popular thanks to a scene in which Pablo Escobar, upon being discovered at an army checkpoint with a shipment of contraband, offers the interlocutor who confronts him the possibility of receiving money: silver or receiving a hail of bullets: lead.
In this video performance inspired by the stereotype of a hitman, from a musical theme in which this character recounts his triumphs. I develop a series of images that seek to question the system of audiovisual violence naturalized in aesthetics of narco culture and the construction of toxic masculinities. Imaginary of violence from someone who inserts lead into bodies and who is willing to receive lead to earn money. A normal exchange in the necro-capitalist system, the murderers and the rotten corpses, become an exchange value in the business of traffic covered by illegality, in which multitudes of men compete to advance in a pyramid of powers, crushing each other.
Ensalada de Frutas / Fruit Salad
Liliana Velez
2009 - Colombia - 4 mins
This video shows what happens when the lines between inside and outside, public and private are blurred. The video documents a painful process, shown through a performance done in private. This process doesn't appear painful; it looks smooth and quiet, like most idealized female expressions. In this performance there are symbols of sexuality, food and female acts.
Nombra
Alejandra Delgado
2019 - 3 mins
World Premiere
The video Nombra responds to a specific moment, in a difficult situation of a country. For approximately three weeks the political and social situation was very intense, generating massive information from various points of view, points that are at opposite ends that, however, both use words to say something for and against each other, then depending on the context the meaning changes completely. When saying these words there is a gap in the lip-sync to emphasize these differences and disagreements between society and that coincides only when the country is named. In a second (parallel) part, the image of scars that are covered with wax is an allusion to what happens with every word said, pain is produced and a perennial trace remains in that territory.
Severine
Lorena Salomé
2020 - Argentina/Canada - 2 mins
World Premiere
A woman caught between two layers of reality. SEVERINE is a video made with sound and images from Belle de Jour by Luis Buñuel. 48 seconds from 5 scenes are cut and pasted to create a 2min 30sec piece.
El Terror no es un Género de Ficción / Terror is not a fictional genre
Viviana Díaz
2020 - Colombia - 2 mins
World Premiere
Terror is not a fictional genre corresponds to a series of short videos, produced to be exhibited on social networks (Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp) in support of the 9M Day without women, in an attempt to create an awareness of the causes of femicides in Mexico. The video was later integrated as a suspense movie trailer, inspired by the aesthetics of psychological horror cinema of the 1950s.
The images used to create the video-collages were taken from commercials from the 1950s, in the midst of the post-war era, where stereotypes of traditional gender roles are reinforced - stereotypes that are still relevant today. Seemingly harmless images are decontextualized to show that in reality they are not. Those stereotypes such as being beautiful, a good housewife, a good mother, and above all being desirable to the opposite sex, reveal a popular consciousness that is part of a great phenomenon in which the woman appears as an accessory, an object, a product to meet needs and not as a human being who deserves respect.
On 9M (March 9, 2019) Day without women, students, workers and housewives interrupted their daily activities and their interaction on social networks for twenty-four hours, in protest against gender violence in Mexico. "Not one less" was the main motto, in a country where more than 1,227 women have disappeared in the last year and where on any given day there is an average of ten femicides and seven infanticides. Part of these “disappearances” of women and girls are attributed to human trafficking, sexual exploitation, slave labour, organ trafficking and biochemical experimentation. The other part of these femicides occurs at the hands of their partners, relatives, or “friends.” This video was inspired by the terror that many women, girls, boys, and families of the disappeared have experienced and the fear that I experienced as a woman facing this reality. In Mexico, terror is not a fictional genre.
Resistencia
Julieth Morales
2020 - Colombia - 5 mins
North American Premiere
FAUX-DIRE, a freakshow of an elephant woman
Helena Martín Franco
2020 - Colombia - 15 mins - Live video performance
World Premiere
An elephant woman is born from multicultural mourning and its derivations. She undertakes an endless search for expressions and effective actions to overcome her grief. When appropriating this feeling associated with romantic love, she conjugates frustrations that take place in other spheres where the identity is destabilized; the immigrant territory, the artistic means and partnerships. Using video, sound, and action, she creates an atmosphere conducive to freeing her confession.
A 15 minute hypermedia performance.
