Sunset Kino is Canada's only outdoor, avant-garde film festival. Founded by Séamus Kealy in Austria in 2017, this festival continues now at Oakville Galleries. Introduced by the programmers and commencing at sunset, audiences experience a curated program of films and videos by Canadian and international artists.
All films are screened outdoors at 8:30PM in Gairloch Gardens. Please dress appropriately and bring seating and blankets. With inclement weather, screenings will be indoors in the Studio, adjacent to the Gallery.
Oakville Galleries operates with support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Trillium Foundation, the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario and the Corporation of the Town of Oakville, along with our many individual, corporate, and foundation partners.
Films by Rabih Mroué
Programmed by Séamus Kealy
Face A, Face B, Rabih Mroué, 2002, 10 minutes
Rabih Mroue's Face A/Face B is constructed around a 1978 sound recording by Mroue and his brother; using virtually no images, this short piece is an intimate record of a family's life affected by loss and the political ideals of the Lebanese Civil War. A metaphysical film exploring the nature of memory and knowledge, sight and sound, physical evidence and identity, and recollection and survival. Acclaimed Lebanese stage and performance director and actor Rabih Mroué leads us on a seemingly autobiographical journey from his childhood, through the Lebanese civil war, to his present as he searches for meaning among the fragments of his memory, cassette tapes, and photos.
With Soul, With Blood, Rabih Mroué, 2003, 10 minutes
The tension between "I" and "we" is at the heart of democratic life. How to be in a collective without erasing one’s individuality? This film focuses on Mroué’s search for his own unique voice, values, and ideas within a group context, while considering the intentional or unintentional overshadowing of others.
Shooting Images, Rabih Mroué, 2012, 9 minutes
Rabih Mroué was particularly struck by a sentence he encountered:“The Syrian protesters are recording their own deaths”. Mroué confronts a harrowing group of videos in which we witness a Syrian protester being shot by one of the regime’s soldier forces. These videos show the moments of eye contact between the killer and his victim, when the gun’s line of sight and the camera’s lens meet.
Cheers to Our Wishes, Rabih Mroué, 2020, 15 minutes
For Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s series of online commissions, ‘CC: World’ (2020), Mroué created Cheers to our Wishes (2020). This video essay combines an adaptation of Antonin Artaud’s story on the oriental plague, an email correspondence between Mroué and his doctor concerning an infection in his way of seeing and a video-letter to his sister in which he reflects on a family gathering.
Footnotes, Rabih Mroué, 2016, 50 minutes
In Footnotes of an Unwritten Text About War, Body and Theatre (2014–16), Rabih Mroué addresses his own experiences of war and its lingering aftermaths. The work collects visual footnotes, unfinished thoughts and outtakes from years of living and working in his home country of Lebanon; references to civil war and displacement are frequent, as well as broader questions about living and dying and the strange commune between. Footnotes was largely completed during Rabih Mroue´s fellowship at the International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures/FU/Berlin, 2013-2014, and was completed in 2016 for the Wiesbaden Biennale/Germany.
10.7.2025
LOCATION
Gairloch Gardens
1306 Lakeshore Road East
Oakville, ON L6J 1L6
START TIME
8:30 PM
Image: Still from Face A, Face B, film, 2002, Courtesy of Rabih Mroué.
