Films by Mike Stoltz, Faisal Karadsheh, Chris Zhongtian Yuan, Monica Maria Moraru and Samy Benammar

Programmer in attendance: Scott Miller Berry’s introduction in person

THREE TURNS

Moving through familial histories and domestic spaces both intimate and fleeting. The five films in THREE TURNS touch upon acts of witnessing, whether loss of domestic space, the death of a relative, the impact of natural disasters, or the revisiting of one’s homeland. Each frame is a window into the past, present and future. Selected by DIFFUSION Festival, presented by re:assemblage collective, Toronto, Canada.

5:00, 16mm on video
Mike Stoltz, USA

A domestic swirl filmed while the building was being sold. How much longer can we afford to stay? A kaleidoscopic portrait of destabilization during the struggle to stay in a rent-controlled apartment amidst an affordable housing crisis.

Mike Stoltz is a Los Angeles-based moving image artist whose practice is dictated by process, working directly with the tools of cinema (images, sound, and time) to reexamine the familiar, the communal, and the medium itself. Stoltz’s 16mm films and videos have screened internationally at venues such as Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Courtisane, Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, REDCAT, International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. https://mikestoltz.org

10:00, video
Faisal Karadsheh, Canada/Jordan

A Hail Mary explores filmic and familial processing, centered on the Toronto Van Attack of April 23, 2018, one of Canada’s deadliest mass murders. Karadsheh’s grandfather, who was only visiting his newly immigrated daughter, was among the victims who lost their lives. The film highlights the subsequent challenges of moving and mourning, depicted through a large-scale portrait of Karadsheh’s mother and grandmother painted in 2018, which becomes the focal point of this short experimental documentary produced five years later.

Faisal Karadsheh is a Jordanian-Palestinian artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto. His artistic practice explores how a body adapts, reproduces and constructs itself. Through a process of collecting material remnants, such as waste, and preserving them via sound or 3D scanning, he ultimately works towards revealing the intricate relationship within the body and its environment, seeking to conceive them as one. Karadsheh’s work spans across various media including painting, sound, video, installations and extended reality, with his most recent presentations at Trinity Square Video, Kingston School of Art and InterAccess. https://faisalkaradsheh.com

12:00, Super-8mm on video
Chris Zhongtian Yuan, China/UK

Following the recent death of L, an artist friend from home, who allegedly suffered from schizophrenia for more than 15 years, the artist talks to L through an imagined letter exchange, where they confront each other on notions of home, vulnerability, resistance, memory, and fraught relations. Centering on an architectural model of the artist’s childhood room, the film is entirely shot on Super-8mm and accompanied by an immersive recording at the artist’s home, as well as original music from London-based experimental group Langham Research Centre. The film draws from archival footage from a journalistic report on May 1968, early artist filmmakers’ home videos, as well as makes references to late 1960s structural cinema that prioritises light and space, as an autonomous site for resistance.

Chris Zhongtian Yuan is an artist and filmmaker based in London. Their works examine the ways in which spaces of absence and exile are politicised through sound and storytelling. Recent works have been shown at Macalline Art Center, Guangdong Times Museum, Reading International, Power Station of Art, Somerset House, Whitechapel Gallery among others. https://chriszhongtianyuan.com

15:00, video
Monica Maria Moraru, Romania/Canada

Relying on oral and fragmentary histories, I Am Also Part of the Three Turns traces the effects of a destructive earthquake in Bucharest and a concurrent flood it caused in a small town in Buzau. In the capital, the destruction was seized as an opportunity by the authoritarian government to further raze large swaths of the city, invoking the earthquake as a mythological force in order to strategically replace rubble with new Soviet-bloc housing projects. Employing allegory as narrator, the film sketches a series of political congruences throughout a patchwork of intertwined landscapes, teasing out a temporally irresolute past that defies the linear cause-and-effect of both environmental disaster and authoritarian political repression.

Monica Maria Moraru is a visual artist whose work seeks within the characteristics of material practice a cinematic expressionism. Her projects often culminate in sculpture, moving-image, installation and sound. Across mediums, her work searches for sensorial and political resonances within a patchwork of temporal and relational histories. Her ongoing research seeks to conjure sensorial polyphonics to decode how contemporary ecological and state-sanctioned crisis become enfolded in a politics of projection, fantasy and mythology. @monicamariamoraru

19:00, Super-8mm on video
Samy Benammar, Algeria/Canada

Mom, you brought me back to our homeland. All I know about these harsh landscapes I learned from books written by the hand that burned these mountains. I try to undo the colonial myths engraved into my memory, but the hills escape my gaze. Do you think I, too, have become the white djinn spoken of by the legends surrounding our martyrs? avant seriana is an essay film shot in Super 8mm film in the Aurès region of Algeria. Observing the landscapes of my native land, I realize that they are divided into several images and times. Two different countries are formed : the Algeria of the mountains and an imaginary one born of the tales I’ve read in colonial archives. My gaze no longer belongs to the places where I was hoping to return to my roots.

Samy Benammar is a Montréal-based artist and film critic. His work as a writer and filmmaker has developed as a form of experimentation around socio-political issues inherited from his Algerian end working-class origins. His films include kaua’i’o’o (2023), peugeot pulmonaire (2021) and sous-ex (2022). They have been shown in festivals across Canada and abroad, and are distributed by Winnipeg Film Group, Vidéographe and CFMDC. His writings can be read in magazines such as Hors Champs, 24 images and Panorama cinéma. He is also conducting a PhD in research and creation focusing on the Wilaya of Batna, Algeria and colonial photography. He listens to the bleating of the goat. No matter how domesticated, they remain unpredictable, and resist docility.  https://samybenammar.com